


The Shadows of the Damned

by nessundorma345 (wastrelwoods)



Series: The Madman and the Trickster [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Avengewho, Bruce is a BAMF don't tell me no different, Character Deaths, F/M, Gen, M/M, Slow Burn, Subtly build the sexual tension, Tony as a Time Lord, comic book character deaths, halfassed Planet Hulk references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-18 07:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 39,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/877306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/nessundorma345
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Mechanic fulfills a bargain, and Loki searches for a way to fix the cracks before something unpleasant gets inside. Of course, of all space they had to pick London, and of all time they showed up two years too late.</p><p>Oh, and then there's the mysterious green beast lurking in the shadows, leaving a trail of death in its wake. </p><p>Perhaps bargains will have to wait.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _Dig up her bones, but leave the soul alone_  
>  Let her find a way to a better place  
> Broken dream and silent screams  
> Empty churches with soulless curses  
> We have found a way to escape the day
> 
> MS MR - Bones

Eenie, meanie, minie, mo. 

His gaze flickered between the two targets, jaw set tight, finger twitching over the trigger as the barrel of the weapon jerked left, then right. Which one? Which one? It was the most important question in the universe at this moment, it was always the most important question. And the worst thing about it was, despite nearly two years of endless searching, countless attempts and guesses, even he couldn't answer it. 

Did that one waver more around the edges than it should have? His eyes narrowed, steadying his grip on the weapon. He drew in a deep breath; waiting, always waiting for the right moment. 

"Please," she whimpered, her eyes closed tight in pure, unadulturated _fear_. Tears spilled down her cheeks, leaving a faint trail of despair there, seeming to glow in the ever-present darkness. Her hands fisted the starched stuff of her dress at her sides, clenched so tight that her fingernails dug into the soft skin of her palms. "Please help me." She was begging, now.

He swallowed, preparing to squeeze the trigger, when another flicker caught his eye. It was the other one, then! It had to be.

He growled, switching targets in the blink of an eye. "Don't worry, Miss Piatt," he assured, voice gutteral. A confident smile flickered across his face. "I'll get you out of here." And he pulled the trigger. 

Darkness swirled up from the space between the cobbles, like smoke rising from a fire. The machine sucked it up greedily, rattling in his strong hands with an almost ominous speed. Her eyes flew open to meet his, spine still tensed with anticipation. 

There was trust in those eyes. Hope. He forced a grim smile, adjusting his grip on the canister of the weapon, waiting for the confirmation that he had made the right choice.

It didn't come.

"No," he panted, shaking it, willing resistance to come from the captured darkness. Because if he had not succeeded in capturing it... "It's wrong. It's the wrong one."

There was no reply. He pursed his lips, gaze traveling up, slowly, to where her face had been. Fingers gripped the barrel tighter. Her bones clattered noisily across the cobblestones, right arm outstretched to him, skeleton fingers brushing the toes of his boots. 

Eenie, meanie, minie, mo. 

With an air of bitter resignation, he lowered the empty weapon to his side, where his arms hung limp and useless. The pale light of the lampost flooded his wan features, his tired eyes misted over with poisonous green. "I'm sorry, Miss Piatt."

*

The Mechanic sighed for the tenth time in as many minutes, pushing off from the console and sending his office chair on a smooth, bowling-ball like path towards the nearest wall. His face was invisible to Loki, bent at a nearly impossible angle over the back of the headrest, arms dangling from the sides, nearly brushing the floor. The tiny wheels screeched unpleasantly against the chrome, emitting sound at a frequency typically detected only by dogs and certain species of elf. 

Loki wrinkled his nose incrementally, shifting the position of his thin fingers where they rested lightly against the cool steel of the railing. He stood, as was the habit he had built up over millenia of court life, so straight that his spine felt like it was going to snap, shoulders squared and feet slightly apart to allow for long periods of staying tediously upright. He'd learned quicky not to lock his knees after the first time he'd blacked out midway through a council meeting and missed out on several peices of information crucial to a few irons he'd had in certain fires, which were subsequently forced to relocate. And the stories Thor told his friends of the occasion had done nothing to temper the blow, either.

He was lost in his thoughts again, he supposed, turning away to stare blankly at the intertwining mechanisms above his head with detached interest. Still, at the moment, his only two options were to be pensieve, or _homicidal_. Another drawn-out squeak of the chair had him  wrinkling his nose again, before forcing himself to exhale slowly and carefully. 

"You know what _really_ pisses me off?" The Mechanic drawled. Loki's grip went white-knuckled in a flash, then released. He spun robotically to face the man who was still sprawled across the chair like some strange cephalopod. 

"No idea whatsoever." His tone was all politeness, but the tension in his eyes would have been an obvious tell to anyone dignified enough to carry on a coversation properly, face-to-face, instead of lounging about like a spoilt child. 

He did not raise his head, instead swiveling the chair with another high-pitched whine until his upside-down visage came into view. "I've taken you to five different planets. Five! And not one of them had the decency to know how to fix your little problem." 

"Believe it or not, dear, I was there," Loki spat out, resisting the itching temptation to roll his eyes with practically _saintlike_ patience. 

The Mechanic ignored him, which seemed to be an old habit of his. "And you, sweetcheeks, you're not exactly helping much." He spun again, the tails of his coat swishing feebly against the floor. "All business and smiles with them, but not one word of assistance, and I know you know more than you'll say about how to patch everything up. Also, you are literally the most shameless flirt I have ever met, and that's counting me, which says something, seriously--did you actually _sleep_ with Wanda? Maybe not, because Peitro would skin you alive if you had, but I'm at least eighty-three percent sure that you seduced her anyway."

Loki allowed a faint smirk to crawl across his face, but he said nothing, crossing the room with smooth, even strides to the workbench in the corner that had been christened 'The Only Thing that Reindeer Games is Allowed to Touch, Ever, in the Console Room'. Vambraces with intricate designs, notes scribbled in an untranslatable ancient tongue, and one or two of his more harmless tricks of the trade lay on the smooth surface. Heavily warded, of course, because while the Mechanic disapproved of anyone 'touching his stuff', as he had so eloquently declared upon Loki's arrival, there was no telling in what light he viewed the double standard of taking it upon himself to have a closer look at his ertswhile companion's belongings. 

"And then there's this! How am I supposed to convince you to sign on to the USS JARVIS in a permanent way if all you do while we're here is sit in the corner and brood ominously? Some first mate you are." His head shot upright, and he flipped a few switched on the console with a red armor-clad hand. Loki scoffed, and he stilled, fixing him with an incredulous and somewhat suspicious look. "Y'know, I'm not altogether sure you aren't _trying_ to make things harder for yourself. If you want the one-trip thing to last longer, hitchiker, just say so." 

It was his turn to look incredulous, although of course with a more regal air. "Your contacts are insufferable fools. They would not have been able to aid me if I had handed them careful, step-by-step directions on the processes required."

"So you do know more than you've been letting on." 

He shook his head, re-arranging his knives absently with an unoccupied hand. "Consider it for a moment, really think about it, if you are in fact capable of organised thought. My mind is full of tears, leaving it open entrely to prying eyes, the existence of which I believe to be quite prevalent. The knowledge I possess, if spoken aloud, will allow others to mend those tears, yes, but it is dangerous information. Those who listen in have dangerous ears, and I will sleep easier knowing they do not know," Loki lied smoothly. A rather obvious lie, actually, as falsehoods went, to anyone who pause to consider for a moment. His dreams were ever disturbed, of late, shifting shadows and whispers from the mouth of something Other. But no one needed know that; nightmares were nothing to fret over. The Mechanic huffed, disbelieving, but said nothing. 

The fact of the matter was, he did know more than he let on. He knew something quite inconsequential to those attempting to fix the cracks: Loki knew how they had come about. He remembered, the day of their first visit, scarce a week ago now, locking himself in the room provided for him with threats of bodily harm if he was disturbed within the hour. He remembered the chill of fear that had run through him, entering the empty hallways of his mind, unsure of what he would find there.

 

And yet, there it had been, blatantly obvious and entirely overlooked. The foundation of his self, his identity, lay in jagged shards on the floor. Rips and open wounds littered the surrounding walls, through which an ominous blue light washed over every surface. The pain, at that distance, had been almost blinding, forcing a swift retreat.

His mind was cracked, he knew, because his identity was shattered beyond repair. And there was no fixing that. 

So why was Loki still here? He gave the Mechanic a sideways glance, then turned his attention on the ship itself. He could feel its incorporeal eyes piercing him. Loki sighed. So many questions he could not answer. The trickster felt that he was beginning to lose his touch. 

The sharp click of a switch being flipped echoed in the vast impossible space, followed by the loud whooshing that signified arrival, somewhere or another. Loki turned again, questions brimming in his eyes. 

"I do have one other friend." He stood, shrugging off the leather coat of his and grabbing a hat from one of the countless work tables. "Doctor Bruce Banner. Advanced particle physicist--very advanced, actually, considering... well, a lot of things. We're travelling through time, at the moment, not just space, which would probably be really interesting to you if you weren't pretending to have seen it all before." Here he took a moment to dart through an adjoining door, resurfacing with both waistcoat and jacket slung over his thin cotton tee-shirt. 

Loki rolled his eyes again, miffed, holding back the rising tide of rampant curiousity and the need to take it apart and shake the Mechanic by the collar of his shirt until he told him exactly how it worked. Moving through time? Very interesting, indeed. He watched intently as pistons shuddered and lights flickered, mouth falling slightly open in awe.

JARVIS came to a stop with an exhalation like a steam engine, the screen hovering near the wall above the door showing a great deal of cobblestones and smoke, and positively pouring rain. Loki stood slowly, following the Mechanic as he strode purposefully towards the door with his typical air of showmanship.

"Oh, and Loki?" He paused with one gloved hand on the knob, affixing the bowler to his head and flashing him a cocky grin. "You'll probably want to slip into something more comfortable."

He winked and sauntered off outside, the door snapping smartly shut behind him.

Loki was beginning to realize the dangers of extended proximity to certain Time Lords, especially concerning the health of his eyes, which were likely to sprain from overuse of sarcastic gestures including eye rolling and glaring daggers. A blanket of seidr shimmered faintly around him, flecking green eyes with gold light. He straightened his coattails with a smirk and followed behind, snapping sharply to close the door. 

"London, Midgard, late eighteen-hundreds," he drawled, gaze drifting along grey buildings and across uneven cobbles. The whole place stank of horse and smog, not the choicest combination. "I am in fact capable of recognizing Victorian fashions when I see them, Mechanic."

He whistled, spinning to face him, which nearly unbalanced the poor bowler. "Damn, that was... fast." His brown eyes lingered far longer than they should have on the sharp contours of his body: his dark, well-tailored suit, his slicked-back hair, his velvet top hat, the emerald silk cravat tucket neatly beneath his waistcoat. A kind of lean hunger ghosted over the Mechanic's face, and he cleared his throat, tearing his gaze away, though it wandered aimlessly. "How the hell did you accomplish all that?"

Loki grinned. "Magic, darling."

"Sure, whatever." He snorted, disbelieving, then stepped into an easy walk just before the trickster, searching for something he would not reveal just yet. "Lock up, JARVIS," he called over his shoulder, and Loki glanced back to see the slight shimmer of an attention-deflecting shield surround the sleek red and gold car. 

"Now, the first thing we should do is not talk to anyone. Anyone, okay, because you look like the kind of guy to accidentally-on-purpose create elaborate paradoxes for shits and giggles, and I've sort of got this headache -- okay, its a hangover, but that's not actually that important right now -- which means if you break it, honey, it's your turn to fix it. Or buy it, but I'm not sure exactly how that would play out with this metaphor. On a completely unrelated note, can we talk about your cravat--" His high voice carried far above the crowd, a steady stream of chatter, which Loki absorbed maybe ten percent of at any given time. Gradually, his attention drifted completely, the one-sided conversation fading into white noise. He watched the street as he walked. The cobblestones shone almost like silver in the grey light, steam hissing up as gentle raindrops spattered the earth. Loki hummed with pleasure, not quite able to remeber the last time he had felt the gentle pressure of rain on his skin. Perfect weather; cool and damp, but not a rumble of thunder in sight. A soft smile crept into the corners of his eyes, though he hoped it would not be easily observed.

The only disadvantage of the current atmosphere, really, was the abundance of flouncing, overdressed mortals tittering endlessly about the wetness, and turning their noses up as though truly oblivious to their lowly status in the universe. Loki picked his way through the multitude stiffly, trying and failing to keep an eye on the Mechanic, who with his speed and stature was easily lost in crowds. Pity that it was far too easy to keep an ear on him. 

Snatches of conversation drifted through the rain-torn air, and Loki half-listened out of habit and a perpetual curiousity buried within him. "Did you see her day dress?" remarked one woman peevishly, as a man with a monocle scoffed, "The problem, my dear, is with Parliament." He turned his head, and heard a man with a sharp chin remark, "I won't be caught up in her ridiculous schemes again," while shaking his head like an aspen leaf, as a brash, high voice called, "Third body found! Extra, extra!"

"Loki!" He snapped back to attention swiftly, to find the Mechanic looking up at him with a petulant expression knotting his eyebrows. 

He swallowed the smile threatening to surface, stepping over a puddle with an air of cautious grace, and standing just beyond the flow of the crowd. The fingers of his left hand twitched briefly at his side, searching for a phantom weapon out of habit. "What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Stark? Is your hat perhaps cutting off the blood flow to your brain? Excuse me for being unable to detect the subtle difference."

"Nix on the sass, hitchiker," he snapped, jabbing an intrusive finger at Loki, as though he had a right. If he wanted his digits bitten off, Loki would have been perfectly willing to accomodate, were it not for the strangely appropriate euphemism about biting the hand that fed you. "I'm gonna say it again, and don't get lost this time. You are gonna wait, right _here_ ," the finger was jabbed a second time, now directed at the cobbles below their feet, "while I find out when exactly we are."

"You could not have asked your machine?" 

He waved a hand absently to accentuate whatever explanation he would offer. "London! 'S pretty wibbly-wobbly, time-wise, damn near impossible to get an accurate reading beyond the decade." And what a poor explanation it was. Loki narrowed his eyes in frustration. "The important thing is that as long as it's before eighteen eighty-five, the good doctor will actually be here. Otherwise we'd need to... I dunno, ressurect his body? We're probably as close as we're gonna get, here. Anyway. Stay." He raised both palms as though directing a spooked animal. Loki ground his teeth together, tilting his head back to the sky to let the rain wash over his face and drip from the ends of his hair. 

He waited for all of five seconds, naturally, before huffing and waltzing off in the opposite direction. There were _standards_ , after all.

*

The newspaper boy seemed delighted beyond reason to have a customer and subsequent reward for standing on a street corner in the rain, pressing a sodden copy of the Times into Loki's waiting hands, and then extending his, palm up.

He raised an eyebrow. The boy grinned, one tooth missing right in the center of his smile. "That'll be sixpence, sir." Loki groaned internally, pulling a few coins at random from his pocket, giving them a quick, halfhearted look, and dropping them into the boy's waiting hand. Too much, judging by his exclamation of "Gor!", but he wasted no time there, stepping out into the shining wet street and wating for a cab to pass in front of him before slipping into the shadows as he'd always done, and reappearing directly behind the Mechanic.

He jumped back with a hoarse cry when Loki tapped him on the shoulder, the muscles beneath his hand tensing as he nearly ran the trickster through with an umbrella snatched from the hand of a lady passing by. Loki pressed his mouth into a thin line and blocked the blow with one hand, snapping it in two as the Mechanic stared, eyes wide. It was too bad for the mortal woman, but despite a rather poor level of self esteem, Loki had enough dignity within him that he was not about to get blood on this coat for the sake of a lacy white parasol. He tossed the shards with same hand, and they landed unceremoniously at the feet of the woman, who gaped in shock. With the other, he procured the slightly damp roll of paper, offering it to the time traveller. "Here."

"You were not there a second ago," he stammered, and then flinched, gaze flickering to the newspaper. He made no motion to accept the offering, Loki's fingers beginning to stiffen awkwardly a second or two elapsed. He cleared his throat, hand darting out and retreating again in a feeble attempt to grasp it, "I don't... I'm not big on being handed things." 

Loki blinked, wet newspaper dropping to his side as he searched the Mechanic's face for something that would make him understand. 

"...You broke my umbrella," ventured the mortal with a very small and hesitant voice.

The Mechanic piped up, "In his defense, I stole it first--"

"Oh, stop your whining, you pathetic creature," Loki snapped, and he looked back with a hurt expression. "Not you, the mewling mortal." He extended a hand, twisting his fingers lazily, then rolled his eyes at her gasp of surprise as the dreadful parasol knit itself back together. "Now, do run along before you faint and I am required to find another place to hold a conversation where I will not be swarmed by _ants_."

The Mechanic was staring at him. Loki sighed and placed the rolled-up paper in his ungloved hand, curling his fingers around it, then stepping back. "We're too late. Your doctor is dead."

This seemed to call him back, and he unrolled the soggy newspaper with curiousity where Loki had found only a vague distaste. He sighed again, tapping his fingers at his side. He knew what it said. November, eighteen eighty seven. Strange, actually, how surreal he found the initial experience, finalizing proof that he had really _travelled through time_. How old was he, right now, back h-- in Asgard? Young, so young, and so innocent as well. 

"Yeah," the Mechanic sighed. But in that moment, he froze again, a slow, wide smile spreading across his face. "Oh."

"What?" Loki could not keep the curiousity from his voice now. 

Their eyes met, and Loki saw, for a brief moment, deep into the heart of a thousand stars exploding at once, a mass of raw elements and blinding light and fiery heat. He felt a surge of chaos sweep him from his feet and bear him up, up until he was no longer falling, but flying among those stars, a thousand deaths and a thousand new lives reaching out to him with fingers of flame. His heart burned like a coal within his breast, an exhalation of anticipation sliding smoothly from his lips. 

"The game is afoot!" The Mechanic exclaimed, spinning on his heel with a cocky grin. "Come on!" Loki was tugged behind him with a jolt, and he wrenched his hand free, breaking into a fast, easy stride just shy of a run, only more fluid. 

_"Come on, brother! It will be fun!" Thor's grin was wide and white. Everyone fell for that grin; maids, einherjar, Mother, Father, and especially Loki. That grin needed only be flashed once and he followed without question, ready to join his elder brother and best friend in their newest adventure._

_This time, however, he hesitated, just briefly, glancing back at the palace receding behind them with the threads of uncretainty weaving through his mind. "Should we not..." he trailed off, he did not know what to say or how to say it._

_"We will be fine! Trust me." Thor reached down to grab his hand, pulling him along behind him. Loki let himself be dragged along, staying just far enough behind to appear reluctant, childish excitement sparkling in his eyes._

_This will be a day to remember, he thought with a smile that would grow to be twice as persuasive as Thor's, and not half as sincere._

*

"Where are we going, if I am allowed the courtesy of asking?" 

The Mechanic did not look back, did not answer, turning sharply once, and then again. He was tempted to slip again through the shadows and keep up, the dogged pace beginning to wind him ever so slightly. Perhaps he was out of practice, having had many opportunities to run quite fast and far before, but next to none in recent months. Still, something in him was hesitant to travel in this darkness. Perhaps it was the time, the strange atmosphere, even the rain still trickling down, but he did not give the shadows a sideways glance.

"Aha!" He stopped too suddenly, and Loki swore under his breath, stumbling back to avoid an uncomfortable collision. A line of houses, identical but for the numbers and, in one case, the brass knocker adorning the door, stretched beyond his vision in either direction. "This is the one, I am at least twelve percent sure. Unless she's moved, which has only happened once and it turned out she had a pretty good reason for it." He tugged the sleeve of his jacket back, exposing the ornate glove, which hovered over the dark-stained wood of the door and bathed it in eerie blue. The knocker was a detail of a spider, gleaming silvery-gold and dripping with rain. Loki watched with an expression of cool indifference, a particular specialty of his. 

 

"If you would do me the favor of answering my earlier question," he reminded, letting impatience seep into his voice. " _Where are we going_?"

The smile the Mechanic wore was a thing he felt rather than saw, still turned away. Nonetheless, he knew it was there, simply because were their positions reversed, he would have been doing just that. "There's someone I want you to meet, darling. Well, re-meet. Is that a word? JARVIS would know, remind me to ask him."

"What purpose could we have in meeting... who is it, exactly?" He folded his arms over his chest. 

He looked over his shoulder, the wide, mad grin plastered on his face coming into view with a jaunty quirk of his eyebrows. "The most dangerous woman on Earth."

Behind him, the door swung open. There was a woman leaning causally against the inner frame of the door, masked in layers of velvety blue-black skirts spotted with mud from the streets. A thin, dark veil obscured all of her face but two bright, calculating eyes. Loki shivered with a spine-wrenching feeling of familiarity, the way her eyes lingered on him sparking a memory that felt perhaps more distant than it was. But who...? 

"Honey, I'm home," the Mechanic drawled flirtatiously. 

"Stark," she snorted, unimpressed.

Loki's eyes widened, as she drew back the veil, letting a shower of scarlet curls fall over her shoulders. It was longer than the last time he had seen it, he thought, and then scowled internally, because he couldn't have seen her before; it was more impossible than a ship bigger on the inside. And yet, the similarity was striking. It was a well-played trick, if trick it was. Her red lips were quirked in a winsome smile, far too familiar, too strange. "I don't believe we've met," he managed to deliver more smoothly than he knew he had a right to. 

Her devilish smile spoke of doubt, a brazen 'haven't we?' but she said nothing, turning her gaze to the Mechanic pointedly. He looked between them, mischevious glint in his eyes to rival the outcome of Loki's grander schemes. "Nope," he extended an arm towards the trickster, who bowed genially, out of habit and practiced dignity. "My newest companion." Internally, he snarled at the title, resisted the urge to correct him, explain their current bargain to this perfect stranger. "Loki, meet an old friend of mine, Miss Natalia Romanova."

*

They were seated as comfortably as possible in the stiff, lavish center of the Midgardian home. A fire burned hot and bright in the corner of the room, dimmer than an exploding star but brighter by far than the darkness of the void. He had missed fire, loath as he was to admit it. Loki had missed many things, though pining wretchedly was useless and pathetic. Still, he took the opportunity to seat himself directly across from the inviting flame, allowing the glow to bask his face at a careful distance. Outside, the darkness gathered as the rain pours thicker, like blood from a battlefield, tracing patterns across the window glass, droplets chasing each other across the surface in an endless dance. 

Tea had been offered, in a uniquely Midgardian fashion. Loki's sat untouched by his elbow as he steadfastedly attempted to ignore its presence. He did not enjoy eating or drinking at all if he could help it, trusting others less even than they trusted him in such regards. The Mechanic took one swallow, and then pulled a face, likely lamenting the lack of alcohol contained in the watery beverage. Romanov took a long, pointed sip from her own cup, peering over the rim at them both. Loki watched her reflection in the window glass. 

"Before anything else, Stark, I want to know why you're coming to me for help." Her voice was cool as marble, with a slightly foreign thickness to it that had not been present in...the other Natasha.

"You know why."

She raised a thin eyebrow in challenge. He figeted in his seat as though it was a bed of snakes writhing beneath him. 

"Doctor Banner," he managed, at length, and the hardened expression of grief that flickered through Romanov's defenses did wonders to explain his reluctance to Loki, who watched, impassive. "I can't..." he beat his fingers in a thrumming pattern against the ornate arm of the chair, then cleared his throat, trailing off.

"You wanted to ask him," she finished, not altogether bitter but with less of the earlier coolness to her tone. "About what?"

"A personal matter, Lady Romanov," Loki cut in with a flash of lying teeth, resisting the urge to send a glare the way of the Mechanic. He had precious few secrets these days, and there was nothing for it but to keep his cards close to his chest until they had occasion to disappear up his sleeve.

"Mister.... Hitchiker has been travelling with me for some time," the Mechanic added, and Loki bit his lip to swallow a scoff at the title. Not for the first time, he lamented at being forced into companionship with such a poor liar, worth less of his trust than even, for example, this mortal woman. Her eyes searched keenly between the pair as he continued, "We're looking for a solution to a very particular problem." His tone was laced with innuendo, although Loki chose not to spare thought to what he hoped to imply with such a vague statement.

"It's Romanova, and please don't feel the need to patronize me," she corrected Loki, taking another sip of her tea. He blinked, calculating the exact amount of time it would take to throw his untouched bevarage across the room, create a distraction, and slip out of the room unnoticed. Her attention slid smoothly to the Mechanic, who tried to look as though he had not been busy with unscrewing a bolt from the fabric of the armrest. "What sort of a problem? Perhaps I might be able to assist you, since Doctor Banner..."

"No, no, I really don't think you've got the kind of experience we're looking for," he interrupted, and Loki could only guess at what kind of conclusion she would draw from that, flashing a smirk at the thought. The Mechanic brought forth the sodden Times, spreading it out over the short table between them. "I thought that this, however, might be right up your alley."

Two pairs of eyes darted over the headline, a dramatic, bold font that Loki mentally translated to the Old Tongue. He whispered it aloud, tasting the potential. "Emerald Horror Strikes Again," he muttered with no small amount of amusement. What area of expertise did this Romanov have, that he would come to her with this? A grainy, black-and-white rendering of a pile of bones was plastered directly beneath the heading, captioned with information about the time and place, useless and alien information to Loki. "The Emerald Horror?" Honestly, he'd more than had his share of poor nicknames over the centuries, but this one gave him a new perspective.

Romanov smiled knowingly. "Oh, I was wondering when you'd turn up to ask about that. But then I knew you aren't fond of visiting after goodbyes." He looked away awkwardly, with some measure of what Loki calculated to be between chagrin and shame. "It's been happening for a few years now, actually. People only started catching on recently. Men and women gone missing, bones found in secluded places. They're saying that this woman, this Miss Tavrie Piatt, is the third victim, but that's not true. She's the seventy-eighth, and that's only counting those I've seen. Which, to be fair, is likely most of them."

The Mechanic looked startled, but comprehending. "Why are they calling it the Emerald Horror? There'd better be a damned good reason, let me tell you, because I thought that I knew bad press names and that one just booted Iron Patriot off of the list completely, which takes some serious doing." He stood, apparently too excited to remain in one place for more than five succesive minutes.

"There have been sightings," she supplied, less eager now. "Flashes. People saying that they've seen a huge green beast lurking in the darkness. They say he eats the victims alive, leaves only the bare bones."

A snort of disbelieving laugter escaped Loki. "Ridiculous. An attention-seeking lie if ever there was one, and a poor attempt at that. I could have spun a better story in the cradle." He relaxed into the chair. 

Her mouth grew tighter for a moment, but she conceded. "Most likely." 

Loki's eyes narrowed. Interesting. 

"No, but seriously. Even the _Green_ Horror, I could accept. Green is normal. But Emerald?" The Mechanic was pacing, thinking, distracting, feet scraping unpleasantly across the floorboards. Loki was reminded of the chair from earlier, suppressing a wince.

"Stark." It seemed that Romanov was equally uninterested in following this tangent to completion, which presumably took quite some time.

"Emerald is the worst..." he froze turning slowly to face them once more, firelight dancing over his features, eyes flickering in shadow. "Did you say he leaves the bones?"

Romanov straightened her back, placing her tea mug neatly in the center of the saucer, a perfect porcelain sculpture. Her entire demeanor changed from polite conversationalist to warrior at attention. "That's all they ever find of the victims. Sometimes items of clothing, but rarely. Have an idea?"

A wry smile split his face. "Just might. Pretty much a genius idea, actually. But I'll need evidence. Investigation, too, most likely." 

Hair glinting like a macabre waterfall of blood and rubies, she stood, sweeping out of the room with a purpose. Loki watched her go with no small amount of interest, but made no comment nor line of inquiry. There were, after all, much more pressing questions to be asked. 

"Is she, perhaps, a great-grandmother?" he began, not quite expecting an answer, much less a straight one, and altogether unsurprised when no reply was forthcoming. "Grandmother, then?" The Mechanic ignored him, flexing the finger-joints of his gauntlet experimentally, as though it were not a routine performed more times than counting. "Or is Miss Romanov her reincarnation? Her twin?" Silence. "Come, now, I have enough guesses to pass hours in speculation, it would be easier on both of us if you would simply explain. Are they one and the same?" 

"Yes," he murmured with reluctance, almost too soft for hearing. "It's her." 

Loki hummed in consent to this fact, resting his chin in one hand. "How?"

The fire flickered lower and redder. The rain fell heavier. He bit at his lip, brows heavy on his drawn face. "She'll be listening, or she'll come back..."

"She will not," Loki assured, "Nor will she hear." Really, he had no aptitude for magic at all, if he was so unable to identify the thrumming seidr surrounding the room. He suppressed a chuckle, focusing his gaze on the hairs curling over the back of the Mechanic's neck with greater intensity than intended.

He seemed to understand, giving the barrier a cursory scan and apparently finding the readings somewhat dissatisfying. He looked to the trickster for a moment, seeking explanation, but Loki was still awaiting his, and he could wait until time itself fell into disrepair, if he so chose. 

"It's complicated, but basically, she can't... Nat can't die. It's sort of my fault, I was the one who brought her with me, one of my best companions. We were good together, Nat and I. And I ruined her for life, which for her... kind of a really long time." He was trying to remain flippant, deteched, but Loki saw an exposed vein, the though of his companions and all the harm he'd done them without really meaning to. It hit just a little bit too close to home, for him.  

_Her hair was beautiful, spun gold, and because of it she could never be a warrior. Loki saw her look on with envy greener than his own eyes, and he wanted to help._

_They talked, she agreed, and he cut it all off, giving her hair black as night. Warrior's hair._

_Years later, he saw Lady Sif still looking on, now at the other women with their husbands, their children. She was a warrior, and because of that she could never be beautiful, though the years had made her haughty and proud. Was it his fault? Loki supposed it was, but he didn't mind it much, Everything was his fault, somehow._

Immortality. What a secret and a burden she bore. "And she still knows us, remembers us?" 

"Obviously," he scoffed, turning fully back to watch the entranceway. Mere seconds had passed outside of this bubble, but he needn't have known that. "It hasn't happened to her yet. Which reminds me, we really gotta figure out the extent of that little song and dance. I'd hate to end up with any more firearms pointed at me."

The sound of a gun being loaded jarred them both from the conversation the instant the shield dropped. Romanov stood in the doorway, oufitted in a catsuit eerily similar to her UNIT outfit, but covered with a dark cloak to mask any presumed impropriety of the day and age. "Well then, Stark," she offered, clipping the anachronistic weapon to a belt with practiced ease, "Where are we going?"

"X marks the spot," he replied, taking the paper from the desk and tapping a gloved finger on the smudged print of the article. It glowed blue, seeming to draw up out of the page as though magnetized, the typeset letters hovering in midair. The Mechanic made a few further incremental motions, weaving a spell of science with dizzying ease, causing the type to bloat. Loki watched the masterful work unfold with more interest than he cared to let on. "Now if we just..." muttured the Mechanic, drawing other information, designs seemingly from thin air; maps, charts, a weather report, notes in a strange language filled with broken circles. "One by the river, the next a street corner, then across town... it really branches out, this Emerald Horror thing, doesn't it? Lets see..." The drawing of the victim's skeletal remains, projection rendered in new detail, came to rest in the vicinity of the trickster's right shoulder. He reached out tentatively, unsurprised to see his fingertips pass through the unsolid image with a faint flicker. 

As if in response to the unwelcome intrusion, all of the images retreated, drawing back into the air from whence they came, the room growing visibly gloomier without their cobalt light. It was as though the stars had gone out. "Chelsea Harbour. No, wait, it's still a train station at this point. Oh, shit, gross. Coal dust and I do not have a very close relationship. It's like that one distant cousin your parents always want you to be friends with but that's too small and annoying and never _cleans themselves_."

Loki again contemplated the use of his teacup, this time to ruin the Mechanic's shoes, but decided that even that was unlikely to render him silent. The undying woman cleared her throat, shifting slightly in the doorway. "Stark, that's not where the last body was found." 

The Mechanic gave them both his best wide-eyed and innocent smile, which was a sight to rival Thor's. "No," he admitted, adjusting the collar his coat, though it was already even enough that Loki found himself wanting to reach out and muss it, suspecting that the gesture was meant traditionally to impress others, or himself. Like twirling a cape or clanging a spear, or in some cases swinging a hammer. He took a step forward, and Loki felt himself drawn to follow yet again. "But it has to have a lot of shadows." 

*

The rain had abated almost entirely, though the day had begun to evaporate along with it. They walked in one of those naturally forming lines that signify much about a relationship, with Romanov in front and the Mechanic close behind. Loki was the outcast of the motley crew, the straggler, behind and to the right of the duo, where he was accustomed to being. A glorified shadow. 

Shadows were the day's topic of conversation, it seemed, rather coincidentally. Loki watched them in the corner of his eye, waiting to see if they would shift or swirl or reach out to grab him. He was entirely unsure what to expect from them, with the Mechanic's cursory warning to 'Just keep away from the shadows, hitchiker.' He used them as pathways, generally, faster than runes and far less likely to cause a headache, but through that experience he knew that something was more than capable of _lurking_ in the darkness with teeth bared. 

"Watching them won't do any good," she reminded with a cursory glance over one shoulder. Loki exhaled a shallow breath of annoyance, turning away from the pool of blackness. 

The Mechanic took the lead. "Of course it will, if I'm right. Which, in my defense, I usually am. Keep watching the shadows, both of you. It might keep you alive."

"And what if you're wrong?" he sneered, simply to be contrary. Romanov's eyes narrowed, apparently oblivious to the dynamics of their general conversations. 

He rolled his eyes dramatically. "Then I'll look like an idiot, and we'll end up having to fight some big green monster with pointy teeth, which, personally, I would actually consider a better option." He sidestepped a long, thin shadow cast by a broken streetlamp. "But if I'm not wrong, and for the sake of argument let's assume I'm not, then right now, this entire planet is in more danger than it's ever been in before." 

Stopping his foot an inch shy of the same shadow, Loki stepped over to the safety and sunlit cobbles on the other side, examining it with resigned mistrust. He was afraid of many things, because fear was rational and kept him level-headed and aware at all times of who his enemies were, but he had never been afraid of the dark. The dark had ever been a constant ally, one he could trust never to turn on him, always to hide him. Never had he known to fear darkness until the smothering endless night of the void taught him that no matter how _constant_ an ally seemed to be, sooner or later it would turn, and he would be left with nothing but a dagger between his ribs. His face darkened, pain flaring up from that untraceable place in the back of his head that made the tips of his fingers ache. The shadows grew claws and tore at his ankles, whispered to him with gutteral voices. _Soon, Liesmith. He is waiting for you._

There was a ragged gasp, and a hollow clanging noise. The gasp, his ears identified as his own, drowning in the shadows, unable to tear his gaze away. The noise he could not identify. There was a hand on his shoulder. "Hitchiker." His eyes flickered to the Mechanic's, shuttering and swallowing the emotion, jaw clenched so tight that it hurt. 

"Seventy-nine," proclaimed Romanov, and for a brief moment Loki wondered if he was dead, a wavering empty skeleton hovering for a moment before collapsing to the ground, but then he saw. There were already bones strewn across the cobbles, shreds of fabric, a grinning white skull staring up at him with gaping sockets. It was a credit to his upbringing that no wave of nausea swelled within him at the sight. Nothing twisted, nothing dead, no corpse however mutilated ever disturbed an Asgardian. Children would cry at their first kill, and then never again, stabbing and crushing until the sight of bone or blood offered them nothing but a vague rush of adrenaline, perhaps even joy.

Bleached bone fingers were still half-curled around a frilly white parasol. Loki's hand extended almost of its own accord to grasp it, run his finger along the healed break in the handle, but another shot out, taking his arm in a firm grip. "Don't," the Mechanic snapped, "The shadows." 

"Whatever waited in the shadows has already claimed its victim." His voice was a hollow echo to his own ears, still sluggish in recovery from his barrage of memories, his waking nightmares. 

"Yeah, and it's still there, and it will melt the flesh off of your bones in two heartbeats. Don't test me on this." The white-knuckled grip on his wrist released in stages, almost robotic movements, leaving him to stumble back from the shadow, flexing waxy, numb fingers and watching the time traveller kneel, slow and cautious, pinching the torn material of a sleeve between two fingers as though disengaging a bomb, shifting it aside to leave the radius and ulna exposed, whiter than sand under the noon sun. The gauntlet's intricate machinery emitted a high-pitched whine as he drew all the information he could, blue light washing over the arm bones like they were coated in ice. The Mechanic made a low hum of apparent confirmation in the back of his throat. "The Emerald Horror strikes again." Loki cocked an eyebrow, slighty piqued to see Romanov's similar expression in his peripheral vision, but more concerned with expressing his general uncomprehending disdain. "What, did you _expect_ something large and green with lots of pointy teeth? I told you, I'm usually right. This isn't some mysterious monster we're dealing with. It's Vashta Nerada." 

Which did exactly nothing to clarify his point, really, but all the same Loki felt an impressive shiver roll down his spine. Romanov pursed her lips, peering down at the skeleton, face unreadable. "It's a shadow, Stark." 

"It's not a shadow. None of them are shadows. Seventy-nine not-shadows, cropping up all over London. Probably it's several swarms, moving around, picking off stragglers, though god knows how the bastards got here. Aggresive little mites, this crew. Smart, though, because in a city this big, who'd ever question a harmless little shadow? No, it's not a shadow, Nat, because look! Nothing casting it." 

Their eyes flickered up, and back down to the pool of darkness half-swallowing the skeleton. Loki's tongue darted out to wet his lips, noting with no small measure of unease that it had gotten smaller; retreating, perhaps, into the cracks between cobbles like water draining through sand. 

"Are all the shadows... so animated?" His voice remained steady and low, vision affixed to the place where the darkness was still shrinking to uniform nothingless. He could feel, vaguely, the echoes of life, thin threads unwinding from the spools of bones. So she was not long dead, this woman. If the signs were not wrong, she had lived, breathed, thought to her full capacity, standing in this very spot, until mere seconds before their own arrival. 

The Mechanic circled the empty street once, arm outstretched to recieve as much information as possible. "That's the problem, hitchiker. That's the million dollar question. Which shadows are really shadows?" He wavered briefly where he stood, as though running ten trains of thought at once and unsure where to turn now that this recent one had reached the end of the line. He directed a finger at them again, brusque and demanding. "Keep out of them, don't cross them, don't let them out of your sight. Turn around and you become prey. Oh, and count them. Count the shadows." 

He started to lead them away, but Romanov stopped, crossing her arms over her chest. "I want proof."

"Neil Armstrong's left nut, Tasha, I can't proove everything to you all the time!"

"Just prove to me that there isn't... some huge green beast," she appealed, the doubt from before shining in her eyes, only for a moment. Loki narrowed his eyes again, mystified in a way that made him want to crawl inside of her thoughts and listen in. "That these invisible shadow monsters exist."

"Nat, there's no way to--"

"I believe I might have an answer," he cut in, turning his gaze back to the skeleton, where the threads of echoes were still unwinding. "I can give her remains speech, for a short time. Would it help?"

"I don't..." he stammered, looking between Loki and the body with mistrust. "Maybe. I don't know. How? Are you gonna use the...?" He wiggled his fingers for apparent effect. 

He sighed, shutting his eyes tight for a moment in supreme annoyance, half-willing a thunderbolt to crackle down from the sky and jolt him into silence. Or perhaps it would simply be easier to pray to the fates for a gag. Loki bent down, touching two pale fingers to the bone that had been scanned earlier. He whispered to it in the Oldest Tongue, spoken by few and understood by none who had not undergone extreme trial to read its writings. It was said that the Allfather had hung himself from the branches of Yggdrasil for nine days before the knowledge had come to him. He himself had learnt it little by little, a word or two for every journey he had made in his youth until he could speak more fluently than the most masterful of all Aesir or Vanir combined. He could move mountains, he could weave mountains out of the dust of stars. And he could burn them, burn the entire sky if he wished.

But this spell, it was child's play compared to all of that. 

The echoes lit up like stars of the night sky, golden threads spinning away and dissapating in the empty air. Or perhaps no so empty, if the Mechanic was to be believed. "One day I'm gonna figure out how you do that," he breathed, eyes intent on the twisting threads. Few were left, now.

"Hello?" her voice was naturally timid, like snapping crystal being stretched to the breaking point. "Who's there? I can't... I can't see!"

"What killed you?" Romanov took it in stride, moving to the edge of the shadow, "Tell us what killed you."

"Hello?" it repeated, "Why is it so dark?"

"She cannot hear you," he explained, as another thread went spinning off, vanishing out of being. Well, not that exactly, energy could not be created or destroyed. It disappated into the ether, ready for reuse. "These are merely her last moments." 

"It's so dark here." Something dark roiled in the Mechanic's expression. Strange, he considered, the differences between them. Loki cared nothing for death, while he seemed haunted by it. Still, death had taken none of those close to Loki. He had never allowed himself that luxury. How weak, to let oneself lose so many that death becomes a thing to be feared. "Why is it so dark?" 

The last thread rose gently into the air like a meteorite.

"Why...dark? So...I can't...broke my umbrella..." 

And then it was gone, like a fire doused. Loki stood, fingers sliding off the surface of the bone, slightly numb from the energy transfer. "That was definitely not a big green monster," muttered the Mechanic. "Also, hitchiker? _Never_ do that again." He spared a glance at Romanov, who  hid her hands in the folds of her cloak to hide their shaking. "Let's get the hell out of here."

The brisk walk of before started up again, albeit with a more urgent pace. Loki walked with the new knowledge that he was unwanted, somewhere inhospitable and quite potentially dangerous. He walked inconspicuously, like the blade of a knife turned to the side and thus rendered invisible and untouchable. Caution on a prince was worn as part feral challenge and part cool normalcy, for all appearances not at all out of place. 

Again, he drifted behind. It was a natural process for him, placing himself just far enough away to be disregarded while still within hearing range. "Chelsea Harbour, Stark." Her red curls bounced as she walked.

He made a low noise of confirmation, coattails swishing against the back of his calves with a faint smacking sound. 

Romanov slowed to a stop and continued, "I know why you're taking us there, and I'm telling you, it's foolish and pointless."

He laughed, demeaning. "Because I wanted a riverside vacation? Sorry, that's wrong, I was hoping we'd take a break  heading through the red light district on the way, pick up a couple of loose women, maybe get a lapdance--they do lapdances yet?"

He could not see if her jaw clenched, but her shoulders were unnaturally even, tense, as she ignored his prattle. "You said it yourself, any shadow could be what we're looking for. So why Chelsea? Because you think you can stop in and visit Doctor Banner's old lab, but you're wrong. That is not our mission right now."

"Oh, I forgot, it's all about missions with you!" he snarled, turning back to face her. Loki's glance shifted between the two for a moment, debating, and he took a silent step back to watch. "Well, Nat, let me debrief you: your _mission_ is a failure. There's nothing more we can do, short of setting up some unbreachable wall around all of London and coming back every thousand years or so to see if they've starved yet -- don't even ask, Queen Victoria and I had a misunderstanding a few years back, there's no way in hell that's going anywhere. And even if it could, what if the infestation has spread further? There's _nothing we can do_. But I have other missions, Nat, and I need to see Doctor Banner!"

Her hands clenched strangely, and for a moment Loki thought that she would hurt him, kill him even, this strange immortal soldier. A strange unease crept into him at the idea, twisting his spine. But instead, she stayed like that, frozen, eyes trained on the ground, burning. When she replied, her voice was even and impassionate, and the fire in her eyes was doused. "Difficult as it may be for you, try to remember that for the rest of us, Bruce Banner is dead."

The idea seemed to pain him. Loki wondered what it felt like, to have a friend close enough that the though of their death would bring pain. "What happened to him?" The question seemed to force its way out of the Mechanic's throat, softer, all the anger vanished from his face. 

"The same thing that happened to all the others," she murmured, almost too soft for Loki to hear. He strained forwards, then turned his gaze respectfully away when she tensed, suspicious. Running his tongue over his teeth, he tried to appear preoccupied with counting the passers-by: a few stragglers late to return home as the sun dropped ever lower in the sky's smoke-torn sphere. It seemed effective enough, a crude farce as it was. One corner of her mouth twitched in displeasure, reflected in the glass of a window opposite. "The Emerald Horror. He was the first to go missing, you know." Loki's eyes dropped lower, searching the cobbles at his feet.

Oh. 

How _interesting._

"The first?" The sound of feet shifting, taking one step closer, to comfort, to confront. "That sounds weirdly like a coincidence. I don't believe in a lot of things, but I really don't trust coinidences."

She made a soft noise of assent, tone free of emotion. "I saw him the evening before." Loki tapped the toes of one foot experimentally, sliding the appendage slightly to the left, and to the right again. "We had tea. He tried to tell me about anti-electron collisions. We were working together, trying to develop an antidote for the... the formula, you understand. I don't suppose I'll ever find one, now." He swallowed, taking a few tentative steps, more slowly than he'd ever dared to anything in his life, until he was facing the pair of them again. His stubborn eyes refused to lift from the cobbles, darting back and forth helplessly. "Still," she acknowledged, "There are worse afflictions than a long life."

The Mechanic huffed a short, bitter laugh. "I wouldn't say that, exactly--"

"I don't suppose this is in any way relevant," he interrupted. A valiant effort on the part of his eyes to meet theirs proved again futile, gaze flickering up and back down as though magnetized to the earth. His hands drifted ever so slightly out from his sides, fingers sliding against each other to dispel any foolish notions of shaking. "But I thought it worth mentioning. I've..." Loki rolled his shoulders once, forcing his head up, but his traitorous eyes fluttered shut. "Well, it appears I have two shadows." 

They extended out before him at odd angles, like a reflection in a broken mirror. One at his side, the other perhaps five degrees closer to the pair. Utterly identical in every aspect, but the distant warmth of the sun at his back would only allow one. Abnormalities of nature, Loki was wary of; if not the dark itself he feared this strange manifestation of it. He could not see his companions' (ha) faces, but the utter dread with which the Mechanic muttured, "Aw, fuck," did wonders to convey the gravity of the situation. 

His pulse jumping suddenly in his neck, Loki inhaled a shallow breath. "Explanations?"

A moment passed in tense silence, like the second before the order is given and a battle starts. Others might have recognized the tension as the split second between a crack of lightning and the deafening roll of thunder, but Loki had never been overfond of thunderstorms. "It's pretty simple, actually. One of those isn't a shadow. One of those is--"

"A swarm?" he finished, eyes falling open, as blank as the sky after a storm. "I am being...hunted, then."

"Well..." He hovered just beyond the reach of the twin shadows, something like disbelief and a shallow sadness etched in his eyes. Was there no hope, then? Wonderful. "Yeah, pretty much. It's how the Vashta Nerada stalk their...prey." His hands clenched into fists, falling back to his sides. "No, no, don't move! Stay completely still!"

"Or what? I will die faster?" he snapped, but obeyed, keeping his eyes locked on Romanov, who was circling at a greater distance. She looked on with the haunted quirk to her brows of those who had seen too much death, but her eyes beneath them were polished rock. The Mechanic's mouth opened, making to reply, but closed again wordlessly. He reached out to clasp Loki's shoulder in some misled gesture of comfort, and he hissed, permitting himself to flinch away from the contact. 

"Hitchiker--"

"It seems to me," he equivocated, "that there is only one option." He looked downwards with a sigh. "I suppose I'll have to choose."

"Choose what?" He stepped back, alarmed. 

He could teleport to relative safety, walk away unscathed, and have the pleasure of recounting the story to those who would appreciate his cleverness, if they existed in this universe. If he picked the correct shadow to slip into. The wrong choice would, of course, result in being reduced to empty bones, but then he felt from the tingling at his toes that no choice at all would wield the same result no matter how still he stayed. 

Still, he argued, gaze drifting lazily between the two shadows, would it really be so terrible to die like this? Over in the blink of an eye. Not painless, surely, but then he hardly deserved a painless end, did he? His lips curled up in a bitter facsimile of a smile. Fitting. It was fitting. 

 _It's the right._ He was mad to think this way, he knew. _No, the left._ But his mind was cracked at the foundation, was it not? _You waste your time, trickster._

Eenie, meanie, minie, mo.

"Loki, choose _what_?" The Mechanic repeated.  

"If I die, you will hear my echoes," he instructed. "Do not listen in." The smile turned genuine for a moment before he stepped forward and slipped into the shadow. 

One thing he noticed immediately was an absence of the white-hot fire of his flesh being devoured. There was no suspicious numb feeling, either, only a blank coolness. 

Loki pitched forward, stumbling out of the Mechanic's shadow and falling to his hands and knees, forehead pressed to the cool, wet cobblestones. "One shadow?" he inquired breathlessly. 

"One shadow," Romanov confirmed in half-whispered shock.

"Holy...everything, Batman! What the hell was that?" Hands at his back, helping him stand, and for a moment he allowed himself to sink into the touch, before tearing away with his usual brusqueness. 

He exhaled, perhaps a bit raggedly. "To put it in your terms, I... teleported." He touched his tongue lightly to the roof of his mouth, noting how dry it was. Perhaps he should have taken the tea. 

"Actually, I've seen teleportation, and that was different," interjected Romanov, whose eyes were wide and only a little bit shaken. 

"Whatever it was, I have a literal ass-ton of questions and most of them start with 'Why?'"

A soft chuckle escaped him, leaning forward slightly because he had too much dignity to allow himself to double over with exhaustion. "I moved through the shadow. It is a skill I have long posessed." It went unspoken, the knowledge of how close he had come to dying, the gamble of choosing the right shadow. Both Romanov and the Mechanic made the connection in their own time, a concerned light playing over their faces. 

"Christ, you're an idiot, hitchiker."

Precisely why his smile widened at that, Loki was unaware. His body acted almost without his consent, amused by the comment, perhaps. He wasn't sure that the warm rush of pure sensation that ran down his spine stemmed from something so simple as amusement. It felt, perhaps, a bit like wanting, which raised far too many uncomfortable questions for Loki to bear thinking about long. 

However, he began to doubt that the next time the Mechanic reached out to clasp his shoulder or help him stand, he would find the strength to pull away. "So," he quipped, pushing the strange train of thought away to fester in the back of his shattered mind, adjusting his cravat, which was turning out to have a slight but uncomfortable smothering effect on the often-bared skin of his throat. "Shall we be off, then?"

"Your wish is my command," The Mechanic extended an arm to each of them, which the lady accepted with grace. Loki rolled his eyes, pushing ahead of the pair. "To Chelsea Harbor?"

He noted with some surprise that the sun had drifted below the line of buildings, so gradually as to go completely unnoticed, casting a dim grey light over London as far as could be seen; which, if you were Loki, was quite far. Both shadow and not-shadow were lengthened dramatically, causing him to raise an eyebrow in unease, but a barely audible clicking announce the lighting of the streetlamps, which banished the darkness to scant corners and the invisible predators to less obvious areas. And lights, for which he was beginning to develop a new appreciation, shone in every window of nearly every building, bright sanctuaries for three wary and weary travelers. The backdrop of the sky was set aflame by sunset, made glorious through the indelible smoke of the city.

Midgard, he considered, was a world of remarkably simple wonders. 

"You know," the Mechanic addressed his lady, giving up with leading her politely by the hand and wrapping an arm around her shoulders firmly. It was distinctly unromantic in nature, merely a kind of companionable comfort. Loki was reminded of a secretive smile shared with a brave man unwilling to admit how nervous he was, a firm hand at his neck, thumb brushing along his jaw in comfort. _You are my brother._ Romanov did not lean into the contact, did not pull away, as though willing but physically unable to make such attatchments. The Mechanic pulled away to a safe distance, apparently sensing her inner battle. "I'm kinda starting to think we can beat these guys, with help from Magic Fingers here. I'll find a way. That's what Starks do best--find loopholes."

 The lamp before them flickered, ever so slightly. Loki paused for a moment, glaring up at it with suspicion, then stepped cautiously over the shadow. Voices other than their own began to ring in his ears, murmurs and outlines in shop widows, a stranger in the street. They were back onto well-travelled streets now, and the decaying smell of the river was palpable for the first time, a stench that had Loki's nose wrinkling reflexively. 

"You can't always do it by yourself, you know," countered Romanov, with a slightly manipulative smile. Loki supposed it would seem winsome to anyone else.

"I should. It would keep more of you from getting hurt." A hand drifted absently toward the light in his chest, smothered beneath layers of cloth. 

A thin, high voice, drifting through the street, caught Loki's attention before he could formulate a deduction from the careful omission. "...so dark in here," was slow to register, but his body sensed the danger before his mind, grinding to a halt, eyes snapping to the speaker. Loki caught Romanov's arm wordlessly, his blood running cold.  "Why is it so dark?" The skeleton flashed them a chapless white grin, the flickering light of the lampost reflecting from the bleached white bones like the gloss of death. It extended a fabric-swathed arm, brandishing the umbrella like a sword, sounding the death knoll again, a broken record. "It's so dark in here. Why is it so dark?" 

"Son of a _bitch_ , that is not okay." The Mechanic pulled both of them behind him with a gesture, brandishing the gauntet on his hand like a weapon, energy swirling in his palm. Both behaviors read as simple reflex. Loki failed to see what advantage cover or fire gave them against these invisible enemies. He seemed to realize this as well, but kept the hand raised in a highly ineffecive bluff. "I don't like magic." 

Something cold stabbed in Loki's gut as he froze, unsure that he had heard correctly. "You blame _me_ for this?" 

The Mechanic did not meet his eyes. "What, you expect me to just believe that a swarm of microscopic parasites had the sheer, unparalleled wit to band together and control an abandoned corpse, which just so happens to be doing the same thing it was doing when you last tampered with it?" He swallowed thickly, stepping back and forcing the three of them under the steady light of the next streetlamp.  "Yeah, sorry, but I don't do coincidences." 

The skeleton considered them, motionless, umbrella still outstretched. "It's so dark in here."

His fingers itched again for a weapon, heating incrementally with potential energy, but Loki banished it, aware that no weapon of his could prove effective against the entity. His upper lip twitched into a snarl of frustration, and he considered, for a moment longer than strictly necessary, driving a dagger into the Mechanic's unprotected back, to pay him back for the raw stinging feeling crawling underneath his skin. It was an old song and dance. Blame the trickster, blame Loki for all the things we are too dull to understand, surely it's all some grand scheme of his, make Loki fix it or...or pay the price. He forced himself to breathe, eyes shutting tight to lock out the world. If he closed them tightly enough, he could pretend he was still falling. Where, it did not matter; through a void, a shadow, a vast chamber filled with melodic blue light, singing to him--

"What do we do?" Romanov queried, voice steady, a soldier awaiting orders. 

"Only one thing we can do." When he turned to meet their eyes, they saw the fear stirring in his own. "Run!"

"Why is it so dark? It's so dark in here." The shadows bent, swelling outwards like a wave breaking on the sand. Above their heads, the light flickered, once.

They ran. 

Loki turned to look over his shoulder, saw a passerby, a mortal not far behind them fall to the cobbles, his bones cracking like china. The girl with the umbrella's remains took a step forward, the parasol wavering in her loose, skeletal grip. It was slow, but still, they were not fast enough. If it is impossible to outrun the light, what hope did they have in eluding the darkness? He reached out to Romanov and the Mechanic, fisting their clothing in his hand, and fell feet-first into the shadow of a horse and cab waiting patiently by the roadside. 

He landed on his feet, watching the Mechanic stumble out of his grip, sprawling in an indignant heap on the ground. The bowler was knocked from his head at last, but he did not seem to notice, breath shallow, his chest rising and falling rapidly. There was an unhealthy pallor to his face, and Loki suppressed a grin, supposing that the experience could well be an unpleasant one when it came without warning. Perhaps it was one of those bone-chilling experiences that one who had never in his life been cold simply could not relate to. He leaned bodily against a streetlamp, taking in the surroundings. They could not have gone far. 

"What in the actual living hell," he huffed, fingers scrambling on the cobblestones for the hat, "Have you done with Natalia?"

Loki looked down at the empty cloak in his other hand, and his eyes widened. He attempted to open his fingers, pry them off of the incriminating garment, but his grip adamantly refused to loosen. A gunshot echoed in the distance, like the last exhalation of breath before death.

"Shit," he hissed, watching the Mechanic's face pale.

He slipped into the shadow and out again, entering the eye of a hurricane. The air was thick with smoke, animalistic roars tearing through the air. He conjured a knife with a reflexive speed, peering through the haze. An almost comedically huge green arm swiped at his face, and Loki ducked, clenching his teeth to hold back a surprised yelp. One step to the right broke his vow of careful silence, a miscellaneous jumble of bones scattering away from his footfall. Whose bones were they? Another roar. No time to question.

Clutching her cloak tightly in one hand and the dagger firmly in the other, he turned a full circle, but the mist obscured his vision fully, a grey nothing in every direction. 

She was gone. 

What next? The Mechanic, he thought belatedly. If he could not protect both, he should at least do what could be done to assist one. Loki turned, one foot in the shadow, slipping away before any more hands reached out of the darkness to grab at him, and almost missed it.

"Oh," Romanov whispered, her voice shaking with palpable fear, and he looked up, vision swirling away, to see her standing but a few feet away, her back to him, adressing something lost in the smoke. "You saved me again."

And he was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Long, silent walks; undead doctors; aliens with anger management issues; folie a deux; and an ongoing game of cat and mouse.

The Mechanic was sulking. 

There was simply no other word for it. It was too petulant to truly pass for grief, too volatile, but not passionate enough to be hatred. Loki was wary as he stumbled back from the shadows. He had been expecting a curse, an accusation. He expected an attack for his mistake. And he was not disappointed, although it must be admitted that he let out a yelp of shock as the metal-clad fist had connected with his jaw, sending him sprawling. Truly, he had anticipated more of a verbal approach.

Strong fingers wrapped around the collar of his coat, lifting his head off the pavement by the nape of his neck, like a hanged man's final fatal tumble. "Where is Nat?" Fury burned in his face.

"She is alive," he spat, flinching away as he moved to hit again, then wrapping his legs about the Mechanic's waist and flipping the pair of them over, pinning him down with his arms caught above his head, a trick he had learnt the unpleasant way from the ever-helpful Lady Sif. "Romanov is alive, but I could not reach her." 

He had stared up at Loki, uncomprehending, for a second or two, before blinking furiously and allowing his head to fall back in defeat. Loki had stared back at him in return, sliding off of his chest before he followed through with the train of thought suggesting that he lean down and sink his teeth into the skin just below his jawline, right there...

And now, there they were, walking side by side in the stiffest manner possible. He had nothing more to say, and the Mechanic staunchly refused to acknowledge him, his eyes cold, his face blank, body tense.

As he had already mentioned; sulking. 

But two could play at that game easily, so he remained equally aloof, a pillar of ice to counteract his simmering anger. Resentment bubbled deep in Loki's gut, which he considered completely justified, under the circumstances. If he had actually been responsible for half the crimes placed upon his shoulders, small wonder he was considered a demon in some circles. Of course it was his skill in illusion that had him branded as a liar, a doer of tricks as insubstantial as the air. 

Loki wondered what conversation would ensue if he were simply to turn to the Mechanic and say, again, "I had nothing to do with the attack on your companion, but rest assured she remains unharmed." He shrugged it off; there was too much truth in the former statement, too great an implication in the latter. Still, he found himself hoping that Romanov still breathed: it was her future words, after all, that had prompted him into first following after the madman with the light in his chest. If she were to die before uttering them... well, he did not know quite what would happen, but he was not inclined to find out firsthand. Something far less interesting than this.

The derelict old house marking their apparent destination was reached sooner than expected, and without any further trouble, though they took care to mark the shadows carefully for the slightest discrepancy. The nightfall made movements simpler, a more clean-cut matter of ducking from streetlamp to streetlamp, taking care to place the light directly overhead at all times.

As for the house itself, it was nothing remarkable in appearance. Small, dull brown, utterly Midgardian in design. Loki knew where they were. There was only one place it could be. He watched questioningly as the Mechanic ran his humming gauntlet over the door once, twice, before giving up and blasting the lock with a concentrated beam. "It doesn't do wood," he mumbled by way of explanation, kicking the offending door open, a yawning chasm into the unknown. Loki did _so_ love those. 

"Right. Bruce's casa es mi casa es su casa, sort of." He extended an arm, albeit stiffly.   
Loki brushed past him through the open doorway, glancing back incredulously. "What do you expect to find in the house of a dead man?"

"The question is," The door slammed behind them, and the lights flickered on. Oh, so many lights; gas lights on every wall, a chandelier on the ceiling, candles both lit and burnt out in clusters on the floor. It was an impressive display. Bottles and tubes in complex arrangements of chemistry stood abandoned on nearly every surface, strange mechanisms for purpose unknown strung up around desks and chairs and tables. But these seemed to have fallen by the wayside, repurposed as mere surfaces on which to plaster more candles. "What don't I expect to find?" The Mechanic took a few more steps into the room, prodding at a mess of tubes, pulling back a silver sphere and letting go, watching the energy transfer to the others with a sharp clicking noise and a great deal of dust. "A Newton's Cradle, sure, I expected that. And a few of those perpetual motion things--which are satan, seriously-- and some half-finished experiments, check and check. Dust, lots of dust," he coughed, stepping away from the flying particles. "But all these _candles_? That's pretty much what I wouldn't expect to find in a place that's supposedly been uninhabited for two years."

Loki peered into the next room, lit with equal fervor. The few shadows that reached the floor were bent back again, as though trying to escape the light. He turned back to the Mechanic, a small smile curling the ends of his thin lips. "Especially the ones that are still lit." 

"Ah." He was staring fixedly up at the chandelier. "But they could have been lit by any old bum squatting here for the week. Or Nat placing candles of mourning every second Wednesday, or something like that." 

"Your Doctor, he was a genius, yes?" he offered up for confirmation, and was not disappointed. Loki's smile grew by degrees. "Look at the floor."

There was a pause, and a low whistle of appreciation. "Looks like somebody was afraid of the dark." He bent over, examining a candle with something akin to glee. "Or what's in it. Not one shadow." The Mechanic looked up, and visibly deflated, seeing Loki still standing there. "You, downstairs, now. I want everything you can find pertaining to your situation, or Bruce's, or Nat's. The plot thickens!" He looked down again, tracing the patterns of light dancing over the floor. 

Loki flashed him a bitter grin, cursing his ancestors and wishing debilitating accidents on his descendants. He was not overly fond of being constantly pushed to the side because some megalomanical dolt wanted to fight his battles alone. But he inclined his head respectfully anyway, tipping his hat towards the Mechanic and spinning on his heel. 

Another gaping maw awaited him at the entrance to the stairs, this time pitch black. So he was to fall prey to shadows a second time? Not so. Loki stole the flame from a candelabra that had once been a perfectly acceptable vase, holding the light in his palm, cradling it as he made his way down the groaning stairwell. 

Once he reached the bottom, it became apparent that the basement was not, in fact, entirely unlit. A soft blue light washed over his shoes, rippling like sunlight on water. Loki's eyes narrowed, unable to make out anything but vague hulking shapes in the dim light. He took a step forward, half expecting to sink below the surface of the almost substantial light. He could not tell its origin, but it seemed brighter in one direction than the other.

Loki noticed, dazedly, that the flame in his palm had gone out, a faint wisp of smoke rising from his skin. Not burned, he was too accomplished a mage for that, but an echo of the candlelight, as though extinguished by a sudden strong wind. But there was no wind down here, only the warm blue light. 

One step, then another, a single-minded pattern. Why had he come down here, again? _To see the light_ a guttural, thick voice supplied, and Loki knew that he should be wary about something, but he could not bring himself to care, because see the light he did. 

It was a jewel, round and blue, set into a wickedly curved spear set on a desk; it lay forgotten, cast aside. And almost without his knowledge, Loki was holding it, his hands fit perfectly around the shaft, like a puzzle piece sliding into place, and he was running a finger over the blade. He watched his blood run from the thin red line across the pad of his finger hazily, detached, scarlet turning purple in the cobalt light. 

It was so _beautiful_. 

"I snagged that off of a band of Chitauri scavengers half a century ago." A white light flooded his vision, extinguishing the blue haze, leaving his mind raw and tingling with pleasure-pain. He looked down in confusion, flexing his fingers around the shaft of the spear experimentally, then looked back up. "Well, not me exactly; the other guy did. Pulled their spines out through their throats, left them choking on their own blood, completely paralyzed. It was very graphic." The thin, tired man looked down his hands as though expecting to see blood drip from them. "He could do it to you, too. Seemed pretty excited at the prospect." 

Loki's stomach turned over, and he brandished the weapon adeptly, shifting his stance fluidly to defense.

The tired man smiled. "Oh, no, please don't do that. It was just a suggestion." Loki's eyes narrowed, head turning to the side in an unspoken question. The tired one lifted his hands up, a universal gesture of peace. "Let's just... do this the easy way where you don't use that and I don't make a mess. Got a lot of toys I don't want to break, here." 

Loki hesitated, but seeing a ripple of something terrifying pass through the stranger's eyes, banished the weapon to his own special storage area, further investigation pending. He did not want to cross this man, who lit a few more gas lights around the workshop with swift precision. 

"Who are you?" He asked it like a vendor at the market would, friendly but detatched. Loki heard the rumble of anger beneath his calm surface. His still waters did not run deep before the current built into a torrential hurricane. 

"I could ask the same of you," he ventured, keeping his tone light. 

"Really? Because from over here, it looks kinda like you were the one trespassing in my workshop." He let out a sardonic little chuckle, but his hands curled into loose fists. Were his eyes green?

Loki swallowed. "Apologies, Doctor Banner, I was unaware--"

"You know, you seem like a pretty smart guy, but you aren't very good at answering questions." He gave another soft smile, rearranging papers on the desk between them absentmindedly. 

It was no trick, his eyes really were green, all through, as though obscured by a mist. Loki weighed his options and found himself very much outnumbered, though he was unsure precisely why he felt the danger so acutely. "I am a friend."

"Then why did you break into my house?"

"I came here with the Mechanic. We're looking for answers."

He looked up. "The Mechanic?"

"Yes," he affirmed, wishing vaguely that he had kept the spear in hand.

"Don't lie to me. Especially not about my friends." A tinge of tangible anger crept into his voice. Loki stepped away, he had to get back upstairs, get away from this strange doctor and his unpredictable moods. 

"I was not lying, I assure you." 

He laughed again. "Yeah, that's real comforting, coming from the guy who just broke in. You wanna tell me your name? Your real name, please, I'm getting kind of impatient, and that's not gonna end well for everyone."

He raised his own hands in clear surrender. "Loki."

Banner's eyebrows rose. "Got a last name?"

Odinson. Laufeyson. Silvertongue, Liesmith, Dreamwalker. Hitchhiker. "Just Loki."

He smiled, "And here I thought Natalia Romanova was a strange name." He hefted a behemoth gun from the wall behind him and pulled back the hammer, barrel at Loki's unarmored chest. His eyes widened, and he searched the floor, damning the man for his paranoid lack of shadows. "Turn around."

He complied, teeth grinding together nervously. "Are you going to shoot me, Doctor Banner? How inhospitable of you."

"How many people have you got upstairs, Mr. Loki?" His head craned upward.

Loki kept his hands raised, in plain sight, feeling the imprint of cold metal between his shoulderblades. "Enough." He felt that a little bluffing was justified, under the circumstances. 

"Enough to take on the Emerald Horror? I'm not sure about that." His tone was almost conversational as he prodded Loki's spine lightly with the barrel, pushing him towards the stairs. "But let's go see." 

Loki smiled; a wide, false affair in white and red. "The Emerald Horror is not here. You of all people should know that. Unless someone else was responsible for the decorations?" Perhaps he could yet glean the information he had intended.

"The candles?" he scoffed, "No, I'm not talking about the Vashta Nerada. I mean the real Emerald Horror, the one who leaves all those corpses behind. I'm surprised you haven't heard about that part, it's in the papers." Loki's blinked, slowly, stinging from confusion and apprehension and the frankly exhausting effort of keeping it all from showing in his face. He nearly stumbled on the next step. "I'm not overly fond of the name myself, but there's only so much a dead guy can do about bad press."

Had they been chasing the wrong enemy? No said that he left all of the bodies, which implied nothing more than the fact that he had not saved them. Loki inhaled sharply. "I see. The true monster is one who--"

"The other guy isn't very good with a gun, whereas I might be able to kill you quickly and relatively painlessly. Stop trying to manipulate me and everyone is happier," he cut in, voice dipping lower, and Loki's mouth snapped shut. 

After the dim, almost dreamlike light of the stairwell, the lights blazing in every spare corner burnt uncomfortably into his retinas. He hesitated another moment, blinking, but stepped fully into the room with another nudge at his back. 

The Mechanic paid no notice, hunched over another complex silver apparatus, his back to the stair. "That was quick. Nothing downstairs then, huh? Fuck, I was hoping his workshop would still be set up." He hissed, drawing his finger back from whatever it had been occupied doing, evidently burnt. 

"I would not call it nothing," he replied primly, feeling the barrel of the gun lower with no small amount of satisfaction. 

"Oh?" He straightened, wiping his hands on his coat absentmindedly. "Show and tell." 

" _Tony,_ " the doctor choked out, and Loki sighed in annoyance, his fingertips beginning to numb from keeping them elevated so long. 

The Mechanic froze, head swiveling slowly to reveal the disbelief etched onto his face. "Well, scratch my label off gently with a coin," he breathed, his dark eyes sparkling with surprise, yes, but also a childish joy, pure and simple. "If it isn't Bruce Banner. Doctor, it is a pleasure." He smiled a wide, genuine smile that lifted his forehead and pulled at his cheeks until they strained. It was altogether unlike any smile Loki had witnessed, as though this impossible, infuriating man was utterly determined to prove unique in every area. "You know, you are a lot less dead than I'd heard in certain unnamed circles, and--oh my God, Brucie," he whined, eyes flitting to Loki's raised hands, " _tell_ me you are not holding my companion at gunpoint. You know exactly how I feel about guns." His mouth curved down in an expression not unlike that of parental disappointment. 

Banner scratched at the back of his head with a free hand, letting the full weight of the gun rest on the strap at his shoulder, sporting a vaguely embarrassed grin. "Technically it isn't a gun," he murmured, "Well. Not really." Loki gaped, unsure precisely how to react, looking from Banner to the Mechanic and back again, then huffed softly and lowered his hands to his sides, where they fidgeted angrily. "I mean, I can't shoot with it." 

His eyes found Loki's, meeker and apologetic, now a cloudy shade of brown that bordered on black, the only shadows in the room. Loki glared disdainfully back, blanketing the urge to snarl, indignant, but he had to crack a thin smile at the Mechanic's burst of merry, unbridled laughter. "Oh, honey, that's balls. You didn't even call his bluff?" 

"I am no fool," he retorted, feeling the smile still, then fall from his lips. "There were more pressing concerns. It seemed... wise not to anger him unduly." 

Pain scorched in the depths of Banner's face, and he looked away. 

"What are you talking about? Bruce is the calmest guy I know. Keeps a lid on everything, he's my port in a storm." The Mechanic clapped him on the shoulder, and Banner flinched away from the contact like a spooked horse, refusing to meet his eyes.

Loki's own narrowed, and he put a few steps distance between himself and the doctor for good measure. "Strange, I seem to recall a rather colorful threat involving the displacement of my spine," he hissed. It took some effort to connect the dots and piece together a puzzle with which he had so little prior experience, but a blurred image was already beginning to surface. There was something about this Bruce Banner that differed critically from the one the Mechanic knew. Such a disparagement was dangerous in many old contacts; the uncertain light with which he saw Banner was easily as dangerous as the shadows, it seemed unlikely to end in something as black-and-white as betrayal.

"Bruce?" the Mechanic offered hesitantly, unsure. "What, are you mad at me or something? Sorry I thought you were dead, but JARVIS said--"

"Mad?" came a half-growl, "No, Tony, you _really_ wouldn't like me when I'm angry." 

And the last piece slid neatly into place. It was not only Banner here. _The other guy_ , he realized, stomach clenching. Stupid of him, really, to have been expecting some mountainous minion to appear from thin air, a bodyguard, of sorts. No, Bruce Banner was his own bodyguard. 

He took a shuddering breath, leaning against the wall to steady himself. "Sorry, I got kind of carried away there. I do that sometimes, you know. A lot, actually." Banner held up a bony hand to the Mechanic before he could even open his mouth, "Yes, I know. I changed. People do, it's what happens while you're gone. "

"You didn't just change, you _died_ , Bruce. The Emerald Horr--" He stopped himself, clenching his teeth. "What _happened_ to you?"

Loki tensed, but Banner did nothing more than flash an exhausted smile. "A lot of things. It's not important." He pushed off from the wall, pulling a matchbox from his coat pocket and re-lighting a few candles with the same automatic swiftness that he had downstairs. Loki was unsure whether to label it a nervous tic or a reassuring force of habit. 

"No, but--"

"Leave it, Mechanic," Loki snapped, palming the fire of one lamp and touching the tips of his fingers to abandoned wicks, spreading the light. Helpful was not his typical style, certainly, without an ulterior motive, but at the moment he found himself wanting nothing more than to banish the shadows. 

Banner watched with detached curiosity, sliding the matches back into his coat pocket. Loki was reminded of their reasons for coming in the first place, and studied the man. There was something special about him, no doubt. Perhaps he would be the one to help fix his shattered mind. Then again, perhaps he was a different kind of doctor. Banner cleared his throat. "I've been laying low. Out of sight. Wasn't planning on running in to any familiar faces from the past." The candlelight dancing across his worn face softened it somehow. "I've been busy," Banner continued, copying the Mechanic and cleaning his hands on the thin fabric of his coat. "Helping people. Or trying to, at least." 

A weapon that did not fire. Loki let his eyes linger on it; simple, but not wholly Midgardian in design. Clean black lines. A gigantic canister, blinking with an eerie green light: almost... emerald, really. "You fight the Vashta Nerada." 

Over his shoulder, Loki watched the Mechanic's eyes widen. Banner's smile shifted, bittered. "And get labeled a murderer for my troubles, I know. Typical, really." He rolled his shoulders, glancing out the window surreptitiously, then turning, opening the conversation to both interested parties. "I've been on the move," he admitted. "I couldn't stay here, you know, what with...I had to disappear. I guess I wanted to start over, slip off the radar." 

The Mechanic paled for a moment, but seemed to smother it, tilting his head questioningly. "What, and suddenly you're back here? Why?" 

The window afforded a view no better than the twinkling of stars and the insufficient light of a distant streetlamp, but Loki could not tear his eyes away. Banner was quiet, distracted, and Loki had the distinct impression that he was missing something very, very important. "I expect," the trickster murmured at length, "That it has something to do with Lady Romanov."

*

"She should be just around this corner," Banner explained, his grip on the gun flexing and tightening, knuckles going white, distant and distracted look still in his eyes. Loki and the Mechanic followed as close behind as they could manage, tight-lipped and slack-jawed respectively. The world was a confused jumble of light and shadows, and they were very much not safe as it was, but then, safety had ever proven itself so _tedious_ , hadn't it? There was a vague aura of authority around the good doctor, a confidence in his bearing. And yet, Loki's natural tendency to flinch from such commanding figures remained dormant for the moment, very much aware that this was Banner's territory now, and there was nothing to be done but to follow in his footsteps until greater opportunity chose to present itself. He raised a hand, slowing them all to a stop, and muttered a soft, "Wait." 

With a tilt of the Mechanic's head, the two of them moved to stand just within the protective circle of light flickering through the window. The sky was mottled blue-black with clouds, which had taken again to darkening the pavement with a steady drip of rain. Banner leaned slowly forward, peering around the corner and pulling the hammer back with practiced care. 

"Who's there?" The voice was high, brash--a young boy as yet untaught the consequences of word and action, to speak with such rough accusation in his tone. There was no face visible to match it, only the scuffle of tired feet on wet cobbles, searching in the darkness. 

"It's me, Rick," vocalized Banner, and Loki detected the relief in his voice, the slight slump of shoulders. 

"Lieutenant," sighed the boy, stepping into view. His hair was long and dark, obscuring the better portion of what appeared to be quite a scrubby, thin face. He was older by a few years than the pitch of his voice suggested, on the cusp of adulthood rather than adolescence, and not well off; one of those bellies that is never full for the sake of necessity rather than a disinterest in food. His eyes, dull with weariness, narrowed when he saw Loki and the Mechanic. "An' who're these?" 

Banner smiled, reassuring. "Very old friends. Well, one of them is, at least, I have absolutely no idea about the other one. But we should be okay as long as nobody tries poking him with any sharp sticks." His fingers drummed against the barrel, as though reminding him of their visit's purpose. "Any change?"

The boy snapped to attention. "No, sir, same as when y' left." His head tilted to the side, indicating a lithe, familiar form frozen beneath the light of a streetlamp. 

"To be honest, I don't think they know what to do with me," Romanov said with a disparaging grin. Her hair glinted copper in the lamplight, eyes cold and impassive. Loki took an impulsive step forward, but froze with something akin to guilt, watching the Mechanic rush at her and pull up short, gazing at the twin shadows that pooled at her feet with fear in his eyes. "They don't know what will happen, if they try anything. I don't know, either," she admitted, her gaze flitting automatically to Banner, "but I doubt I'll enjoy the experience." 

"Nat," the Mechanic groaned, stumbling away. "Please, no." 

"Stark. Good to see you again, but sorry, I'm a little preoccupied at the moment." She did not spare him a glance, studying Banner and waiting for something. Loki let his seidr pool warmth in the tips of his fingers, watching the doctor begin to pace back and forth, but sent it away again. He was powerless, ultimately. 

He remembered her body slumped against the wall at all the wrong angles, staring with white, empty eyes at a long-gone enemy. He did not wish to see her broken like that a second time. How many times, Loki questioned, would she end like this, pushed to the boundaries of death and unable to cross over?

Her gaze had wandered his way, perhaps in surprise, though if she felt shock she did not show it. "Mister Hitchhiker."

"Miss Romanova," he stated, by way of introduction. Her eyes narrowed for a moment, piqued, and Loki winced, remembering the chaotic terms of their last interaction. 

"Doctor Banner. What took you so long?" Romanov diverted, with a positively knifelike smile. Warm familiarity flickered in her eyes, an appealing mask on her finely crafted face. 

He chuckled softly, the merest wisp of amusement. "You wouldn't believe the traffic around here, this time of night." Banner shifted, affixing a pair of thin wire glasses to his gaunt face. He stood straighter, slipping into the role of the caretaker quite smoothly. "How do you feel?" 

The undertone to his voice matched up neatly with the tilt of self-deprecating melancholy to the Mechanic's eyebrows. Loki reached out to bar his forward motion with one arm, drawing him back into the light. 

Romanov rolled her shoulders once, an almost imperceptibly small motion. "My neck's going stiff. Carrying any miracle pills you can prescribe to me, Doctor Banner? Maybe just an aspirin?"

He hefted the gun still hanging at his hip, leveling it at Romanov's head, and Loki's eyes narrowed in curiosity, still holding the Mechanic back with a steady hand. Banner shook his head, replying, "You know, I'm really not that kind of a doctor." The barrel lowered in stages until it fixed on the cobbles just before her feet, twin shadows spilling across the stones like ink. "Any helpful hints, Miss Romanova?" 

"Your guess is as good as mine."

Another thin laugh. "The other guy's guess would be even better, of course, but he doesn't seem too fond of a few of us here." A pointed glance at Loki, who raised a brow noncommittally. "You being the exception, obviously, Nat, though God knows how you got on his good side." 

The air was still and silent for a few tense moments, five pairs of eyes fixed on either of two dark patches, searching. "I think..." Banner's lips thinned. His finger ghosted over the trigger, then anchored firmly and _pulled_. 

The sight, Loki knew, would remain forever branded into his memory; the concussive blast of light followed by a thin tendril of black smoke, torn from the earth to gravitate back at Banner. The shadow rose into the night like the echo of a candle, retreated into the barrel and thrown into the depths of the strange weapon. The entire process lasted but a second or two, leaving nothing but the evaporating smell of tar and one less shadow on the rain-washed cobbles.

Two gasps of awe and two of relief, respectively, tore from the throats of the onlookers. The Mechanic seemed to _sag_ against the firm pressure of Loki's arm at his chest, a strange but not altogether unpleasant feeling. Banner remained as he was, tensed and silent, cradling the gun in his wiry arms expectantly. After a moment, a faint shudder escaped him, and he too sank down, the boy intercepting his fall with a dexterity that suggested practice. "Lieutenant?" he ventured.

A slow smile wrinkled the creases of Banner's eyes, and an easy laugh spilled from his lips, the sound grating and guttural from underuse. "Got 'em."

"Okay," the Mechanic breathed, placing his own hand over Loki's to push away and leaving his fingers strangely numb in the cool, wet air. He ran his hands over himself absentmindedly, preening for some grand declaration. "All of you have got some serious _explaining_ to do. It's official. You're driving me crazy. Crazier." 

It was not an unexpected demand. In fact, it encapsulated Loki's own thoughts at the moment quite well. "Agreed," he echoed, flexing his numb fingers, feeling the dull pressure of raindrops against the bared skin. A phantom sensation of the Mechanic's touch lingered as though branded into the skin. Perhaps he would start wearing gloves. 

The Mechanic's eyes lingered on him in suspicion, and Loki remembered his earlier accusations and paranoid ramblings. _You're going to explain, too,_ , that dark gaze promised, and Loki huffed. 

The bulky, unfamiliar weapon gave a jerk, shuddering in Banner's arms, and he swore lightly, giving it a hard slap with the palm of a hand. A few lights flickered, as though reminding the ragtag bunch that even with their small victories, they were not out of the woods yet. "Not here," he argued, sparing a glance at the gawking boy. "We have to get back to the tunnel, Rick. You take the rest." He stood, balancing the weapon like a broken glass sculpture or an infant liable to bite. "I'll go on ahead."

"But, Lieutenant--"

"I need to let him out. He's fighting me, and I don't want to hold back," he intoned, and there was something dark seeping beneath his skin once more, shifting like the parasitic shadows trapped in his machine. "Keep them safe. Keep yourself safe, too, Rick."

"Yes, Sir," the boy conceded, and Banner smiled a thin smile laced with visible pain. 

Too quickly even for Loki's eyes to follow, he had vanished into the night. Romanov watched almost idly, rain under the streetlamp covering her in liquid gold. 

"What the hell is going on? Where's Bruce?" This time, Loki made no attempt to bar the Mechanic's path as he stormed at the young boy, hackles raised. He was unperturbed, securing the rather floppy hat to his rather dirty head and beckoning them follow with a rather thin finger. 

"Stay in the light, but don't be seen," he ordered, suddenly seeming much less the weak adolescent. His footfalls were firm and commanding, following a path tread a thousand times before. It was a curious display to Loki, who loved to see the confident spring of pride well up before a particularly delicious fall. Not that he truly wished harm on the boy, but he was, after all, simply that. Young. Very much so, in fact, as he was currently in the presence of two immortals and one man who had at least the longevity to pass for one. Still, they fell in step behind him, the Mechanic looking almost distraught at his own utter conformity. 

"No, but seriously, where did Bruce go? Will someone tell me what in the name of astrophysics is going on right now, because I'm about to snap and start firing repulsor blasts at things until they give me answers."

"Patience is a virtue," Loki hissed, just to be contrary.

The Mechanic sighed, petulant but determined. "Do I _look_ any kind of virtuous to you?

He made to retort, but found himself cut off. A gut-wrenching scream rent the air, freezing Loki's blood and clawing at his spine mercilessly. His feet abruptly stilled, weighed down with invisible mountains. His eyes widened, staring blankly at his immobile feet. The Mechanic and Romanov beside him were similarly afflicted, paralysed as the tail end of the scream became a roar. Not one of unspeakable pain, but one of triumph; a man seeing the sun again for the first time in centuries would make such a sound. 

The boy-- Rick, was it?-- winced almost imperceptibly, and then urged them on again, his masks firmy reattached. The Mechanic went slack-jawed in horrified confusion. "Are we not going to go back for him? Because I'm going back for Bruce." 

Loki's arm shot out again, grasping his shoulder, locking him in place, and damn it, he really needed to start wearing gloves if all touch felt so strangely all-encompassing to him. The Mechanic cursed, struggling, but he simply dug his fingers in. "Doctor Banner is gone, Mechanic." He spared a glance at the mortal boy Rick, whose head swiveled nervously. Romanov cocked a small pistol pulled seemingly from nowhere with a loud click. Loki raised an eyebrow, searching for confirmation, "Although perhaps not the way you think. He will join us again when we reach our destination."

She smiled faintly, eyes darting over the rooftops in a broad sweep. "You are very perceptive, Mr. Hitchhiker," she murmured.

"We should go on," the mortal boy interrupted, jerking his head to the side sharply, an indication of direction and impatience. 

The Mechanic let out a noise very much like a whine, still struggling, eyes darting between the three of them. "You all know what that was, you secretive fucking bastards. Why is no one telling me _what that was?_ "

Loki ground his teeth together, releasing the Mechanic and letting him stumble away a few uncertain steps. "Darling," he droned, turning to follow the boy's lead, "That was the Emerald Horror."

He blinked for a moment, then shook his head. "Nope, I'm still confused. More answers? I need actual explanations."

"Then I suppose you'll have to come along and wait for the rest."

A conflicted growl. "Can I have him followed, at least?" 

There was an electric pop, and Romanov clicked her tongue, fastening a foreign, bracelet-like device to each of her wrists. Loki's eyes narrowed, and she quirked her eyebrows dangerously. "Gladly," she quipped. "I have some questions of my own." 

Loki looked to the mortal, questioning, and was met with an uncertain shrug and slightly wary smile. "Do try to avoid getting killed, Miss Romanov," he warned as she slipped away. 

"My name is Romanova," she called back, with which Parthenian Shot she departed. Loki turned back to the light, and hoped that this time, he would see her safe return. 

*

It was a long, silent walk.

Loki tried to avoid the swarm of questions rattling in his head; what with all the mad dashes over the infested city he had hardly had ample time to collect and organize his thoughts. Chaos, as a general rule, was all well and good to Loki, but it was so much more entertaining to watch others scramble for footholds while he stood by, pulling the strings and knowing the answers. 

Well, he considered, it was just as easy planning while on the move as sitting in a quiet corner. He would take what was available under the circumstances. 

One thing was certain: that all of the mysteries here congregated around Doctor Bruce Banner, deceased particle physicist. A copy? A ghost? Or something more? 

It was, he surmised with a sideways glance at the Mechanic, useless to let his mind wander in circles. There was information he needed, and it would be provided in time. The only question that remained relevant was of the validity of any given information revealed to him. 

More obliquely put, who did the trickster trust? 

He studied the profile before him; a furrowed brow, pursed lips that twitched in thought, dark eyes and sun-kissed skin. The fascinating thing about the Mechanic was his series of masks, so intricately crafted that at a glance, one swore that it was his real face that showed, more easily read than a child's picture book. Even one as excruciatingly dull at comprehending emotion as _Thor_ would look on him and swear to know what he was thinking and feeling. It was, or course, one of the grandest lies that had ever gone unspoken, created in such magnificent detail that heat pooled in Loki's belly at the thought of taking the illusion apart with slow intimacy and peeling the masks away layer by layer until the truth shone red and raw beneath. 

No, there was no trusting him. Loki smiled lasciviously, turning his gaze away and his thoughts to the scarlet lady. 

She was, of course, a liar of the first order, for which Loki commended her. Obviously not worthy of anything resembling trust, but without the delightful secrecy of the nameless Time Lord's falsehoods. Manipulation was much more her forte. Loki found himself resenting her for that; he had always attached a blatant sort of sentimentality to most dismal attempts at manipulation. It was not a far stretch, to his mind, dubbing Romanov sentimental. Perhaps it was her display in UNIT's glass cage that had cemented his belief in her inherent weakness.

It followed, then, that the only person worthy of Loki's trust was, of course, himself, since Banner was an unknown variable and everyone else insipid and dull. But... perhaps even that certainty had its drawbacks. The truly frustrating symptoms of his mental vulnerability ensured that even knowledge kept in the confines of his own mind might be... compromised. Loki stumbled, giving the darkness a wary look and clenching his jaw. 

Had he not, back in the confines of the Mechanic's machine, confessed to such a possibility? He had intended it for a complicated lie. It could prove, with time, an inconvenient truth. A pity he could find neither knowledgeable nor trustworthy expert to advise him in the fixing of his broken mind. 

Sometimes, Loki thought, it was a terrific pain in the arse, being smart. 

"Who are you?" The Mechanic slid forwards, putting himself at confidential conversational distance to the boyish third party, apparently deciding that now was as good a time as ever to begin his assault for information. 

He did not even look back. "Rick Jones."

"And who is he? Your friend with the big gun?" 

There was a confused, stifled cough, and Rick Jones' step faltered. "Doctor Bruce Banner. I thought y' knew 'im." 

The Mechanic snorted derisively. "Obviously not. What, has he mentioned me?"

"Never, sir."

"Well," he pouted, lagging slightly, "He wouldn't. How did you meet him?"

Rick Jones tensed, and Loki cocked his head, listening closer. "He saved my life."

The Mechanic faltered and stopped, masks slipping long enough to reveal a flash of quiet frustration. "See, that's what I don't get, here. The saving people thing. Bruce didn't do that -- he was a good guy, the best, but he wasn't one to make the sacrifice play. It's what I liked about him, knowing he wasn't going to charge off and get himself killed for me or anyone else." The gauntlet fizzed a few halfhearted sparks as he waved it over the boy's chest and head, scanning. "And then suddenly he did, for you, which means either that he had a miraculous change of heart and died saving you, in which case that can't be Bruce Banner, or that the guy who saved you was never Bruce Banner in the first place." Cursing, the Mechanic withdrew his probing, metal-clad hand. Rick looked up at him, unsuccessfully trying to seem impassive, eyes wide and almost fearful in the lamplight. 

"So then, Rick Jones," he continued, strolling forward a though there had never been a pause. "Which was it?"

"He saved m' life, Mr. Stark," Rick stammered, half to convince himself. 

"Yeah, my...well, not my dad, but close enough -- he was Mr. Stark. I'm Tony or nothing, kid." Almost as soon as he delivered it, the Mechanic spun off course again. If the man's tongue were a team of horses, Loki considered, they would carry a driver to Hel and back faster than a drop of water could fall from Yggdrasil's lowest leaves to splash in Mimir's well. "And that's not Brucie, though if I had to pick out of a lineup I'd be scrambled as eggs. Bruce Banner wouldn't even have known you were in danger until you were bones on the street, Ricky, much less how to draw the Vashta Nerada into a vacuum." 

The mortal's eyes sparked like flint. "He didn't save me fro' the Vashta Nerada, sir."

In the corner of Loki's eye, something shifted, something vaulting across the rooftops like a bat out of hell. He turned, searching the darkness up above with a questioning glare, but all was still. There was a rustle of cloth and a flash of scarlet, a ringlet of hair caught by the moonlight. Ah. Banner and Romanov were not far behind, then. 

"Not the--" The Mechanic choked, eyes spinning as he recalibrated his theories. "I'm missing something, here. Something really important." His steps quickened. "Where are we going?"

"We're 'ere." The mortal stooped to lift a plate in the ground that resembled a sewer entrance, thin arms straining to shift the solid mass of metal. He dropped it with a huff, gesturing at the narrow opening into the street. "Mr. Tony, Mr. Hitchhiker." Their eyes met, mirrored looks of incredulity twisting their brows. The Mechanic stooped to look into the choking darkness below, the faint glow of his shining heart a poor substitute for a flashlight. Loki bit his lip, resisting the urge to lean over and _push_. There would be no one to frame, after all. 

"Under the Thames? You got a secret lab down there with lots of booby traps and minions? Do I look like a master assassin to you, kiddo?" 

Rick Jones did not dignify the comment with a response, for which Loki silently thanked him. "After you," he offered with a thin smirk.

The Mechanic sighed and dove feetfirst into the darkness.

*

When she reached the roof, fingers scrubbed raw from clenching bricks and pipes and windows in search of a foothold, he was waiting for her at the top. A bulky, black outline perched on the edge, fearsome and mysterious. Natalia merely raised an eyebrow.

"You shouldn't have followed Hulk." His voice was deeper than she had expected, faltering, as though words were foreign to his mouth, which was thankfully lacking the sharp teeth of the carnivore he had been accused of resembling. Natalia folded her arms over her chest, considering him. 

"Are you really green, or is it the light?" Her tone was too cold, she registered, she was not interrogating a prisoner, after all. 

The Emerald Horror shot her a wide, toothy grin that seemed made to be followed immediately by a shattering blow, turning to face her. "Does it scare you, pretty lady?" 

Natalia gave him a grin just the wrong side of smug, perhaps passable as bemused. "Nothing scares me." Not hubris. A fact.

"Nothing?" Suddenly he loomed closer. Her eyes narrowed, but before she could raise a finger in defense he was moving, faster than breath, and her back hit the solid mass of the roof before Natalia could even register the impact, jarring loose a few tiles. A green hand, impossibly large, larger than life, held her down expertly, white grin gleaming above her in the darkness. Her lungs burned with the pain of losing breath, eyes widening of their own accord. 

For a length of time that was likely only a second or two but felt like years, there was only that: no breath, no movement, no noise, trapped and frozen. Natalia murmured a curse in Russian that came out as a panicked whimper, struggling feebly. 

The monster laughed. He laughed long and hard, shaking with amusement, and finally moved his hand back, still laughing like a madman as she rolled up with her knees drawn in to her chest in self-defense, fingers fumbling-- _fumbling_ \-- with the Widow's Bite. 

His laughter faded slowly, but the madness remained. "Hulk may have saved you once, pretty lady, but he can still snap you like a twig." He bared his teeth in a snarl, and this time her stomach turned over. Natalia's fingers would not stop shaking, there was too much adrenaline beating through her veins, all the inconvenient symptoms of fear. 

"Twice," she gasped, "You've saved me twice."

He looked almost amused, green eyes burning with rage. "Your puny Doctor friend saved you once. We not the same. He is weak. Sentimental." 

"And you," Natalia ventured, "you're not?" He growled, and she tensed further, willing the roof to swallow her up. "Why did you help me?"

He backed away, face hard. "You not Hulk's enemy. Hulk fight the Vashta Nerada. He did not mean to save you."

She crawled to her feet shakily. "You killed all of those people?" 

He recoiled as though bitten. "No." 

"No?" Her voice was too cold again, but at least it remained steady. 

"They were the failures. Hulk picked wrong shadow," he murmured, almost too quiet for Natalia to comprehend. "Or they came back. They don't like to lose prey." He turned away again, and she took a tentative step closer. "You should not have followed Hulk."

"He asked me to. The Mechanic." She hovered behind him, almost close enough to touch, to trail her fingertips over the thick green skin. "I simply followed orders."

Another laugh rumbled through him, taut muscles quivering. "Following orders never got Hulk anywhere, pretty lady." Natalia could not see, but knew he was smiling again. "Don't follow Hulk again," he commanded, and then leaped onto the next rooftop like a giant green flea. "That's an order!" he called over one broad shoulder.

Natalia took a deep breath and vaulted the gap between rooftops without hesitation. 

*

The walls were round, paneled, and far too cramped for Loki's liking, lit only with the faint glow emanating from the Mechanic's chest. A built-in nightlight with all the subtlety of a kick in the face, Loki considered, wondering what the purpose of the thing was. It was powerful, round, and blue, reminiscent of the spear he'd stolen from Banner's basement, with the caveat that of course one could never manage to stab anything with the Mechanic, unless metaphors of sharp tongues counted. Perhaps the two circles of light were related after all.

So many investigations pending, Loki realized with a chuckle. He really was quite starved for entertainment these days, was he not? 

Where the tunnel might lead remained a mystery at this juncture, no evidence but walls that seemed to narrow around them like blood vessels pulsing. The sound of a river rushing over them buzzed in Loki's acute ears, so loudly that there were moments he suspected he would drown, and leaned against the walls for support, sucking in a greedy breath.

The Mechanic seemed particularly displeased with the situation, swallowing thickly every few steps further into the gathering unknown. He took no notice of Loki's unsteady fumblings, but once, he himself stumbled, and Loki placed a hand on his shoulder to aid him. There it was still, that rush of all-encompassing warmth that flooded him at the simple contact. He cursed, drawing his hand back. The Mechanic's dark eyes met and held his for a long moment, then he cleared his throat, turning away. "You aren't bringing us down here to kill us, by any chance, are you, kid?" His fingers brushed against the wall, eyes following the smooth arc of ceiling from side to side. "Because I should warn you, I'm a professional survivor of inescapable death traps." 

"Just ahead," the boy replied, unfazed, and as soon as the words left his lips Loki saw the gleam of light in the distance, a spark of hope. 

"Convenient," muttered the Mechanic darkly, but he moved faster and with greater ease down the passage. 

And then, abruptly, he froze, palms flat on either side of the tunnel wall, staring into the light of the room beyond. Loki's breath quickened, and he tried not to feel trapped. "Do you _mind_?" he hissed, eyes narrowed. 

"Holy mother of fuckballs, look at you," he whispered, and Loki fought a snarl. "No, seriously, _look at you_ , you beauty." He stepped into the room as though entranced, palms still glued to the wall, running over it in a bizarre parody of a lover's caress. "Oh, you sexy thing."

Loki ignored his deviant ramblings, all but clambering out of the passage. Rick Jones sauntered calmly past, flipping a few switches with practiced order and flooding the room again with light. He could have sworn he heard the Mechanic _moan_. 

"Third Kree Empire technology. I was Kree Emperor once. Well, no, I married him. Well, sort of. Thought he was a she. All those jewels, very misleading." He paused, lost in the memory, and Loki shot him a bemused glance. "Love the Kree. Not quite on par with JARVIS, but then what is? Still, mark VI vortex manipulation core, hyperlink capabilities, chameleon arc tech, and don't even get me started on the security systems--"

As if on cue, a myriad of red lights began to flash in eerie unison, the syren song of alarms wailing. The mortal stumbled back, and Loki shrunk down, hands drifting to cover his ears reflexively as an inhuman, guttural growling sounded from every direction at once. 

"That is not Kree," the Mechanic cursed, giving the boy's confused and terrified expression a cursory once-over before stumbling past him to the panel of switches. Loki straightened, slightly embarrassed at the knee-jerk reaction, drinking in the blinking of red lights, like so many menacing eyes. The growling continued, and Loki clenched his hands into fists, only half aware that they were not to be set upon by a pack of wolves.

The projection of a screen emerged beneath the Mechanic's hands, invisible writers scoring it with letters like the marks of claws and twisted knives. He sucked in a breath. "Also very not Kree. JARVIS," he muttered, placing two fingers over the circle of light in his chest, "Translate." 

Almost instantly, the menacing growl was replaced by a cool female voice. "Welcome, honored guests. An intruder has been detected. Prepare to be incinerated." Loki raised an eyebrow. 

"This is new, yeah?" The Mechanic's gaze did not leave the screen, now etched with an array of his broken circles. The alarms blared on.

Rick Jones nodded, wide-eyed.

"Incineration in --" the voice slipped, an apparently untranslatable growl escaping once more. 

"Numerical capabilities too, JARVIS. Honestly, sometimes you make Dum-E look intuitive." He traced a few new circles onto the diagram, swearing under his breath when they did nothing. 

"Eight," the female voice continued as though it had never stopped, "seven...six."

"Son of a bitch," the Mechanic complained, with a dirty glance at the ceiling. Loki took the precaution of shielding himself, just in case. 

"Five....four....three."

"Gotcha!" he sing-songed, tracing a final circle, and all the red lights flickered out, the cool voice crackling and silencing. Loki released a breath he had been unaware of holding, dropping the shield. No longer bathed in bloodred light, the room was spacious, light, and entirely as confusing and--apparently aptly--alien to him as the Mechanic's impossible ship. A few pipes were clustered in one corner of the ceiling like uncertain guests hovering at the edge of a ballroom, sparing wary glances at the door. Piles of boxes, varying in material from wooden crates to deadlocked safes, lay stacked haphazardly about the room, as though abandoned mid-task. It seemed, atypically of any ship, to be a combination of flight deck and cargo bay. 

His brow furrowed. "Banner is one of these...Kree?" 

"Of course not," the Mechanic explained, crossing his arms over his chest. "The crew weren't even Kree. One of those tribes of Sakaar, judging by the defense systems. Blow them all up if they can't speak your language, typical Sakaarlan for you. Easy to bypass, just bring along someone who can speak the word 'cancel', or fool the system into thinking you can. Or take out the entire system." 

"Of course," he retorted, dripping sarcasm in waves, "Silly me."

The Mechanic had either the intelligence of a brick wall or ignored him entirely. "Question is, what is a Kree-Sakaar ship doing here?"

"It crashed," the mortal supplied, and the time traveller's eyes alighted. 

"Of course! Two years ago, and you went near it and did something stupid, and Bruce Banner saved your ass." His coattails swished rhythmically as he paced. "Shit." He froze. "Shit, that's it! The Emerald Horror--"

"--Is Banner," Loki finished for him, as he continued, "--Is a Sakaarlan." They exchanged another look, this time perfectly unreadable. "Both, somehow," managed the Mechanic. 

"It is possible for two forms to occupy one body," Loki mused. "Perhaps he is a shapeshifter, or possesses other magical capabilities or relics. It simply replicates Doctor Banner's form, or shares it." Another thought occurred to him, but he bit down hard on his tongue to contain it. What was the likelihood, after all, that the true Banner had all his life been a creature merely masking as human, whether aware or otherwise? It would do no good to plant such painfully familiar concepts in the Mechanic's mind. 

He did not seem to have realized the possibility himself, rather staring at Loki as though he had just danced about the room in woman's attire, bellowing drinking songs. "Let's stick to the realm of things that actually happen and are backed by proven science, here, Dumbledore." He ran a hand through his hair with air of weariness. "Relics. Okay. There's an idea. We'll check the cargo. Still haven't figured out how the Vashta Nerada got here." 

"Not the boxes," Rick Jones called, reaching out his arms to their full gangly span in a vain effort to stop them. "Th' Lieutenant says never t' touch the boxes!"

"People have died, and that officially means I'm in charge, and I'm going to touch whatever I want," the Mechanic barked, kicking over a crate, not marking the contents as they spilled out. Loki stared at the compact spheres that rolled across the floor. Or, more accurately, at the series of broken circles stamped on the side. From this angle, they looked oddly like the word _Stark_. "Spare a helping hand, hitchhiker?" Loki tore his gaze away, stepping toward the boxes and bending to feel along the rim of a corrugated metal container. He meant to use an old trick of his, heating and cooling it alternately with his touch, but let his fingertips simply hover for a moment, uncertain. 

The growl came before he could so much as twitch, like the snarls of the security system amplified ten times. Loki cursed in several languages and a few more dialects, drawing his fingers back as though burned. "I don't suppose you would happen to know what a Sakaarlan looks like, Mechanic?" he whispered. 

"Pretty much like that, actually," he replied, gesturing to the gigantic green berserker standing in the adjacent doorway. Refuse from the river ran in rivulets over taut skin, dripping from a mass of unkempt dark hair. Green eyes were full of hate, and rather too fixated on Loki for his liking.

"Thief," it growled, and he swallowed, "Liar. Hulk squash you like an _ant_."

Seidr scorched in his fingers as he backed away, locking eyes with the beast. "I thought you were fonder of the idea of tearing out my spine. Honestly, it's like I don't even know you anymore." 

"Shut your mouth. Hulk will tear out your lying tongue." 

Loki smiled faintly. "It's not the first time the suggestion has been made." 

With a flash of red hair, Romanov slipped from behind the advancing behemoth. "Bruce, he's a friend, he's with us. Calm down."

"...Bruce?" the Mechanic stammered in disbelief. In what way was that a priority right now, Loki wondered, sending a glare in his direction.

"Don't touch Hulk's friends," the monster roared, barrelling at Loki. He raised his palms in defense, fingers curled into claws, ready to burn or shock or simply hit with the force of a few trains. Banner's berserker moved too quickly for him to flee, even to make a duplicate, all he could do was brace himself--

\--for a blow which never came, interrupted midway with a soft puff of air followed by a sharp cracking noise. The beast was flung violently to the side, the spent sphere dropping to the ground, where it lay smoking. 

Loki inhaled sharply, and suddenly there was someone standing before him, between himself and the creature now picking himself up from the splintered and dented crates. "Don't you touch him," the Mechanic snapped, his gauntlet raised and ready to fire. "You want him, Bruce, you have to go through me."

He stared blankly at the back of the Mechanic's collar, uncomprehending. Loki felt his throat close, and he swallowed to combat the feeling. The room spun, and he blinked to clear his head, unsuccessfully. There in front of him, still, was the man the world knew as Tony Stark. 

Loki took it back. He was aggravating, foolhardy, altogether idiotic, and seemed to harbor a death wish parallel to Loki's own. 

The monster that was Banner had righted itself, stumbling forward heavily like a man with a load on his back or a horse with a lame leg. "Hulk is not your weakling scientist," he roared, eyes glowing brightest green, and _charged_.

A meaty fist smashed into the wall behind Loki, about the height of his head before he had grabbed the Mechanic by the shoulders and rolled out of its path. A choking spray of dust flew. The beast turned to strike again, and this time Loki rolled away from the Mechanic, who fumbled for another of the strange silver spheres. 

"Get down and stay down, child," he hissed at the mortal boy, who stood with a confused look. Loki shoved him away with one hand, sparing a worried glance at the fast approaching Banner. 

Romanov jumped into view with a flying leap, knocking the beast back into the wall, but a wayward swing of the arm sent her tumbling away again, upending a stack of crates with a resounding crack. It was lucky for the woman she was immortal. Loki took the opportunity to duck behind a stack of metal containers heavy enough to store something perhaps non-explosive, pressing his spine against the ridged metal and allowing his eyes to flutter shut, pulse hammering in his neck. 

There was another animalistic roar, and Loki was jostled from his hiding spot, the metal caving like silk in the breeze. He bared his teeth, fingers wrapping around the nearest bit of wreckage, a thin, black stick covered in buttons and humming with inaccessible energy. He cursed, throwing it away. Before his grip could find purchase around a more suitable weapon, Loki was hefted bodily into the air, viselike fingers wrapping around him, squeezing until his ribs shattered like shards of glass. "Puny liar," the Thing growled, eyes alight with bloodlust. 

"Aren't I just?" Loki's double gave his brightest flash of bloodstained teeth, disappating into dust and light. The beast howled with anger, shoving aside a pile of boxes as though they had personally offended them, ignoring the reverberating slam they made upon collision with the door. 

It occurred to Loki, as he pulled Romanov from her wreckage quietly, that they were after all underwater and perhaps allowing the damage to the walls to continue in this fashion might ultimately prove unpleasant. He slipped along the wall to a better viewpoint, considering the benefits and detriments of speaking up. 

His mouth opened and closed again noiselessly, watching the Mechanic's fingers dance over the surface of his silver toy, twisting it apart and launching it at the monster's back with smooth finesse. Another explosion rocked the cabin, Banner flying forwards and skidding across the polished floor with an unpleasant scrape. A grenade, then. 

Loki opened his mouth again, intending to make his thoughts known, but Romanov interrupted, "No more explosions, Stark. We're in a submerged pressurised metal container, how thick are you?" 

"They're fun," the Mechanic grinned a bit too wide, perhaps outright crazed. His eyes met Loki's with a sparkle of recognition, of a shared rush of adrenaline cementing a sort of depraved bond. 

"Behind you!" The Mechanic was unbalanced and out of view in a heartbeat, another stack of crates demolished. Romanov muttered something rude in Russian, cocking and firing the pistol at her side with one fluid motion. 

The berserker brushed off the bullet like the sting of a gnat, swatting at the air. It was entirely untouched, hale, and angry as ever, despite the two detonations set off in its direct vicinity. Loki swooped to retrieve another of the silver grenades as it turned its wrath on the woman. 

"No explosions!" She called. Loki scoffed, and simply threw the little sphere, which bounced quite neatly off the creature's chest, thudding against the floor rhythmically. It paused, sufficiently distracted. 

"I would make some sort of idle threat," he droned, stepping back and crouching into attack position, movement which did not go unnoticed, "But it seems a waste to expend perfectly good words on a dull beast like you." Its eyes narrowed menacingly, muscles rippling as it thudded forward.

Loki was ready, reaching into his private storage area and _pulling_ , drawing out the glowing spear. He smiled, feeling the calm numbness wash over him as he swung hard enough to crack bone, deflecting a massive fist driving at his face. It fitted so well into the palm of his hand, this weapon. Well, he supposed, crouching to avoid another blow, every king needed a spear. 

"You've been keeping secrets from me, hitchhiker."

He laughed, tossing the weapon from one hand to the other. "Don't worry. You'll get used to it, after a while." 

Romanov shot him an accusing look, shielding herself from a wave of debris with the dented lid of a crate. "You stole an alien weapon from Banner's lab?" She spun like a ballerina, throwing the impromptu shield at the green monster. "I'm surrounded by idiots."

"Not stolen. Repossessed," he lied, deciding that he wielded it with sufficiently convincing familiarity to at least claim prior knowledge. It mattered not that he had never seen the thing before in his life, he was familiar enough with the type. It hummed with power of the kind usually locked up in the Allfather's deepest vaults. A relic for a relic, not only a spear for a king. 

Loki distracted himself from such thoughts by stabbing forcefully at the behemoth, which dodged the blow far too easily. He frowned. "Is there no way to reawaken Banner?" 

"He has to calm down," came the thin, wiry voice of the mortal boy, poking his head out from behind a thick pipe. "His 'eart rate has to drop below two hundred."

Loki and Romanov turned simultaneously. "What? Don't look at me, I'm better at getting things angry," the Mechanic huffed, narrowly avoiding a crushing swing. Loki raised an eyebrow, then ducked and rolled again as a giant foot came down where he had previously stood. "Alright, so the Emerald Horror is Banner! I was wrong! What do you want, a Pulitzer? I think I have an extra stashed somewhere in JARVIS' trunk." 

"Perhaps you could thank me," Loki retorted, slashing blindly through the air. "Or prostrate yourself at my feet in worship." 

He let out a breathless laugh at that, rich and dark. "Little busy for that right now, honey. Don't worry, I'll make it up to you later," he added with a cocky jaunt to his eyebrow. 

Loki smiled wide, accepting the unspoken challenge. "Anytime you like, dear. I'm very _flexible_." Something between approval and hastily staunched lust brightened the Mechanic's eyes, and Loki dragged his tongue over his teeth, very much enjoying it. 

The sound of splintering wood brought them both back into the moment, Romanov practically cartwheeling out of the path of a massive hand, dropping the fragments of a decimated board. "Is this really the time?" she gasped.

"The creature seems beyond banter. I take amusement where I can find it," explained the trickster, unable to fully resist the urge to twirl the staff between his fingers. It was an impulse he should not have indulged, caught more than slightly off guard when the next blow knocked him off of his feet and sent him flying into the pipes behind which the boy crouched. He groaned, pain flaring through his ribs and lancing across his spine. 

"HULK SMASH." 

"You know, he has got a point," he heard the Mechanic mutter. "Witty repartee is one of my more brilliant features, so I'm told. Holy shit, that almost took my head off!" 

Dark spots danced in his vision, and Loki felt himself about to be dragged down to the land of his recurring nightmares and the whispers of the being he simply called 'Other'. His stomach churned. "No. Not now, not here." His fingers clenched and unclenched, grasping at thin air. Loki needed...he needed _something_. 

His fingers closed around it before he fully registered its arrival. called to him, to his hand. A jolt of energy surged through him, and Loki smiled, gripping the spear tighter and rising to his feet, braced against the curved metal of the pipe. 

"Bruce," called Romanov, palms raised in a gesture of peace, "I need you to calm down." 

The beast's resounding laughter echoed through Loki's ringing ears. Truth be told, there was a semblance of Banner's own dark chuckle inside the sound. It was in no way calming. 

"Deep breaths, big guy," urged the Mechanic, taking a step closer. "Nice, deep, even, it's-getting-hard-to-breathe-in-here breaths. Let's try it again without smashing. Cool? Shit, where's the huge bag of weed when you need one?" 

"Shut up," it roared, hefting a crate and sending it on a straight path towards the wide-eyed time traveller, who cursed again, firing the beam of his gauntlet to stop its progress in midair. The explosion rattled across the floor, causing Loki to stumble and fall to one knee, using the spear as a sort of crutch. It seemed almost to direct his arm of its own volition, as though the weapon were a sentient being, as though it controlled him as much as he mastered it. 

He struggled to his feet, blood pounding in his ears, a soft hiss of discomfort slipping between clenched teeth. Loki _felt_ the moment the beast turned its gaze on him, wincing with the air of one who is aware that they have been found somewhere they were very much meant not to be and can come up with no believable excuse. His arm flew up, a ray of concentrated energy whirling along the shaft of the spear and pulsing out of the tip, and he rolled to one side, sliding behind a pile of debris left from some earlier impact with a pile of crates. 

"No more collateral damage, you two," ordered Romanov, jaw tight. "Unless you're dying for a swim." 

The berserker pounded a frustrated fist into the pipe with a clang, and Loki felt some of the blood drain from his face. The boy, he was back there, he was going to be hurt. He stood, firing another blast of the strange energy, successfully capturing Banner's attention. There were certain kinds of collateral damage he considered more worthy than standing idly by. 

"Banner," he called, and saw a wide, tombstone smile spread over the monster's face. It stepped closer. Good, he breathed, Rick Jones was safe for the moment. 

"Going to fight Hulk with his own weapon?" 

"This?" He hefted the spear higher, tilting his head questioningly. "No, you've never fought with this. You wouldn't need to. Brute force is your modus operandi, _Lieutenant_ , crude and ineffective. Real battles are fought with words and tricks. I'm rather an expert in such areas." Loki smiled, watching the green face twist in anger. In his hand, the spear hummed with anticipation.

"You talk big for someone so small," he said, something of Banner rippling through its countenance, which hardened. "Words no use when Hulk snap you like a twig." 

Loki felt himself lifted by one ankle, dangling upside down before the monstrous green visage of the Emerald Horror. His eyes widened, jaw hanging open in fear, which prickled along his skin like spider's feet. 

"Loki!" "No!" Yelled the time lord and his lady simultaneously, and the beast grinned wider.

Then the faux-Loki shimmered with pale golden light and faded into nonexistence, the real one sliding out from behind the back of the behemoth and lowering the tip of the spear to its bared chest. Loki felt the power as a rush of blood to the head, eyes fluttering shut as the monster _shuddered_ and collapsed. 

"What did you do--"

"Lieutenant--"

"Banner's back! It's Bruce--" 

He stood there, frozen, eyes closed and spear arm extended, thoughts a whirlwind. The hazy blue light danced in his vision, blurring the lines until he felt almost trapped in his own head. It was a more pleasant experience than he would have imagined. 

"Loki?" There was a hand on his shoulder. Loki shuddered, hissed, pulled away, his eyes flying open. What he saw made him angry, and he didn't know why. Just the boy cradling the fallen doctor. "You okay?" 

"You ask as though it really matters to you, _Stark_ ," he snapped, whirling around. The anger pounded in his temples like the beat of a hammer. "Does it really? Standing there with all of your baseless accusations, calling me liar and trickster and agr when I have done nothing? Do you truly care for my well-being? Or am I there to take the blame and cater to your desires?" He could feel the hair rising on the back of his next, watching emotions play across the Mechanic's weathered face like a movie. Why was he saying this, allowing this shower of words to gouge like blunted knives? 

He did not know, but he did not want to stop. "What grounds have you to distrust me? You yourself hold secrets and lies to topple worlds. Perhaps you have toppled them, sat by and watched them rip apart like sand beneath the waves!" They were too alike, too much a twisted parody of each other, that even this spewed accusation landed home, somehow. "Spare me your pathetic stories. Your lost woman? The glowing heart that beats in your breast? I care not. I care _nothing_ for you, Mechanic," he spat, lied, "Do not pretend to extend such courtesy to me." 

Fire burned in the center of his chest, like a glowing coal in his mouth. Good, perhaps it might melt him. "What do you find so terribly interesting, boy?" Rick Jones looked fearfully back, and Loki's fingers tightened in a white-knuckled grip on the handle of the spear. "Does the monster scare you? Look away, if you must." 

"Loki," Romanov interrupted, calm and diplomatic. "Put the spear down." 

He snarled, meeting her cool gaze with fury in his eyes. "The woman with a thousand names. You presume to call me by my own? You are quite a gifted liar, for a woman, but Loki will not be matched at his own game by a worthless bitch." 

Her eyes glinted like steel, and he clenched his teeth, breathing heavily. "So that's how you want to play it?" Her voice was steady, thrumming with anger that reflected his own. 

Loki raised the spear. 

His head bounced against the hard floor before he saw it coming up to meet him, the spear flying from his grasp. Loki moaned as his arm was twisted behind his back, feeling a wet rush of sticky redness trickle over his pale forehead. "Checkmate, Mr. Hitchhiker," Romanov murmured, slamming his head once again into the floor as blackness overtook him. 

*

His hands were bound. How very primitive. Loki drew a deep, ragged breath, careful to keep his eyes closed and his posture limp, slumped against whatever surface he was bound to with his head bowed and aching. He swallowed quietly, mouth dry as sandpaper. 

"--he's waking up. Stark, go get him some water." The tail end of a sentence floated drowsily through his head, the realization slow to dawn, stirring faintly to hear the distant voices more clearly. Damn, people were always so careless when one feigned unconsciousness. 

"There you are. How do you feel? Rage level at or below homicidal?" Loki exhaled slowly. The speaker was not addressing him. 

"You know, it's not like I haven't done this before." Banner's voice was tired, hoarse, and Loki strained to hear. "The whole prisoner tied up in the corner thing is a little new, though, Tony. I thought he was your companion. What'd he do, break your action figures?" 

It appeared he was within sight distance. Inconvenient, but expected. Loki relaxed slightly further, wincing when his entire body _throbbed_ in protest like a giant bruise. 

"That's the issue, Bruce, is we don't really know what he did. It was goddamn freaky, that's all I know." 

"It looked like he used that spear over there to draw your anger into himself," Romanov explained. "But I'm hardly an expert. That's my best guess." Loki tensed, digging his wrists into the bonds until they went numb, which admittedly did not take long. Not nearly enough slack for an outright escape attempt. Pity. 

"Poor bastard," Banner sighed, followed by the sound of shifting, a figure sitting up in a bed. "I don't envy him. The first time's the worst, having all that bottled up inside your head, and suddenly there's someone else in control."

"You misunderstand me, Doctor Banner. He didn't turn into your..." she trailed off.

"Hulk. His name is Lieutenant Hulk of the Sakaarlan Warbound." There was a low whistle from the Mechanic, who evidently understood the implications of the title fully. "But you said he didn't...?"

"No," cut in the Mechanic, "But his eyes sort of glazed over, and he... uh, he got pretty angry." The memory of the angry, empty words he had spoken so callously caused Loki's head to flare with burning pain. He could feel the crusted blood sealing one eye shut, and felt a wave of nausea swelling in his chest.

There was a long pause. "The spear, you said?" 

"Yeah, the Glowstick of Destiny. Lightsaber meets spiky death club. He may have stolen it from you?"

"It's Chitauri tech." 

There was another low whistle, and Loki resisted the urge to lean his head back against what he could only assume was a pipe. "Hell of an energy reading coming off that thing." _Yes_ , Loki thought, grinding his teeth in frustration, which did nothing to lessen the pain in his head, _there is_. 

"Low-level telepathic field around the jewel in the center, Sir, discharged upon contact with skin," explained a familiar dry and robotic voice, soft as though emanating from a handheld device. “Cognitive recalibration appears to have reversed the effects.” 

"Daddy loves you the best, JARVIS. I'll make it official."

"I'll pass along my condolences to DUM-E, Sir. I'm sure he'll be crushed. Additionally, you may want to be aware that Mister Loki is currently regaining consciousness. Might I suggest medical treatment for that rather nasty head wound?" 

Loki let out a long, slow breath, craning his neck up to allow his head to slump back against the pole. "Well, well," the Mechanic drawled. "Welcome back, sleeping beauty. How's the head?" His jaw clenched, wrists still straining against the bonds. 

"It has seen better days," he replied, the sound unexpectedly ragged and soft. His dry throat burned. He slitted open his eyes, and slid them immediately shut again, the dim light of the unfamiliar surroundings like a flare to his blurred vision. When he opened them again, with caution this time, the light seemed softer. The Mechanic's back was turned to him, as was the lady's, but Banner watched with a strange, unreadable expression in his face, and Rick Jones hovered a few feet away, staring intently. 

"Yeah, well, you kinda deserved it," he said coldly, and Loki smiled faintly. 

"I did." The Mechanic turned, looking at him in surprise, but he kept his face neutral, drawing comfort from the cool, smooth metal of the pipe against the hot skin of his neck. Loki swallowed around his clumsy sandpaper tongue. "My sincerest compliments to Miss Romanova for a job well done." 

She nodded in approval. "You're welcome." 

His smile widened a little further, tugging at his face and causing the wound to reopen. Loki winced, visibly this time, flinching to keep the blood from trickling into his eye. He made to raise a seidr-washed hand to his face and close the wound neatly, but was stopped immediately by the coarse bindings, and a bone-deep exhaustion which trapped his magics within his core for the time being. Shifting, he bent his spine ramrod-straight against the pipe, regaining some small measure of dignity. "If it's all the same to you," he croaked, "A drink would not go amiss." 

"Looks like you could use a band-aid there, too," remarked the Mechanic, reaching for a half-full glass beside Banner, who had been slumped in a comfortable looking captain's chair overlooking the portion of the room which seemed designated as cockpit. He sauntered over to crouch beside Loki, who looked back with apathy. "Or maybe stitches. Dunno. Or you could fix it with _magic_." He smirked as he delivered this last statement, as though it were the most ridiculous thing in the nine realms. 

Loki stared blankly. "If you intend to deny me the water, at least have the courtesy to say so, rather than hovering there and prattling." 

"There's the hitchhiker I know." He raised the glass as though offering it to be taken by hand and, seeming to realize his mistake, creased his brow. Loki frowned, searching his face and wondering whether he planned to follow through or not, and froze at the gentle pressure of fingers at his jaw. The Mechanic paused again, then tipped his head back gently to pour a little of the water into his waiting mouth. Loki swallowed almost gratefully, trying to ignore the warmth blossoming where the callused fingers met his skin, either because he wished to lean into the contact or pull away. He was not sure anymore.

Three, four more sips were delivered this way, and he swallowed it all greedily, eyes falling shut as the hot wetness of his blood fell across his lid. The glass was emptied, and the Mechanic withdrew it slowly, letting his fingertips linger a second longer before pulling away stiffly, and standing. 

"We were just discussing the little temper tantrum you threw last night. I'm sure you remember the one, you and a glowing pointy stick versus the Black Widow?" Loki kept his eyes lightly closed, focusing a moment on the sensation of breath filling his lungs, suppressing the growing urge to retch. He wondered if the Mechanic was hoping for confirmation, but made no move to reply. What was there to be said? Seeming to realize no reaction was forthcoming, he continued, "What's the deal with that spear, anyway?"

Loki raised an eyebrow. "Rather a broad question, isn't it?" Allowing his eyes to slide open enough to peer disdainfully past, he let his gaze wander past the Mechanic to Banner and Romanov behind him. He smiled thinly. "As the machine said, it contains a low-level telepathic field, capable of manipulating, among other things, the area of the brain which dictates emotions, either accentuating a feeling already present or causing new ones to be formed with no apparent cause." 

The Mechanic stared impassively back. "So it usually affects the user like that? Or have you not owned it long enough to figure that one out? Because I gotta tell you, pretty glaring engineering oversight, right there." In response, Loki flicked his eyes upwards, tilting his head to the side. Telepathic fields were rather a prevalent issue to someone of his current mental state. He seemed to make the connection, nodding slowly. "So what you're saying is that you used it to flick Hulk's off switch, and made yourself angry in the process," he clarified. "Pretty goddamn angry. You sure that none of that was you? Heightened emotions and all?"

"Heightened emotions? A few sharp words?" Another wave of queasiness struck, and Loki's mouth twisted involuntarily, eyes falling shut once more to avoid meeting Banner's sympathetic gaze, or worse, the Mechanic's. "The last time I was truly angry of my own volition," he explained, "I lost control and slaughtered thousands of the inhabitants of a neighboring planet, betrayed and killed my father and brother, and attempted to end my life by throwing myself into the void of space."

He choked out the last phrase with an admirable display of apathy, which crumbled, slumping down and letting his head fall forward, tired and bloodied and exposed like a nerve. Loki's head and heart pounded. 

There was a tense silence, stretched so thin that it felt like the edge of a knife to Loki's gut. He looked up to see the Mechanic's face inches away, his eyes flinty and dark, expression neutral, and swallowed to see him raise the gauntlet, light gathering in the center. Loki felt a pang of sorrow, closing his eyes, shuttering the window to hide the broken glass beneath. 

His bindings fell away, and Loki rose stiffly, wrapping thin fingers around the rope marks lining his other wrist. Banner rose to his feet, arm outstretched in a placating gesture of... what, exactly? He smiled a hollow smile, something struggling on his tongue to make itself heard. Banner's mouth twitched, and he seemed to suppress the urge. "And how do you feel now, Mr. Loki?"

"Do you wish me to claim that I am still angry?" he countered, with no small amount of sarcasm, "Or perhaps suicidal?" Loki opened his mouth in an empty, breathless laugh, but doubled over, grunting, and retched. The acid burned in his still-parched throat, and his head spun. He remained crouched there, gagging, wretched and pathetic, one arm curled around his waist and the other bracing him against the pipe. Gradually, he became aware of a hand holding back his hair, his blood and sick staining the floor, and laughed again, raw and dry. 

"Look at me." He was too dazed to recognize the owner of the voice, too dazed to do any more than obey, craning his head, eyes flitting over the blurred face of the speaker. They kept sliding away, threatening to roll back in his head, and Loki struggled to keep them still. He felt seidr flicker and die beneath his skin, feeble and useless magic. There were hands on his face, cool and grounding, holding him still while the world spun around him, and he wished they would let go. "Yeah, definitely concussed. Loki. Loki, come on. Keep looking." 

Loki. Loki. _Look, Loki._ The words bounced and rattled around in his brain, thumping against the walls. They seemed like meaningless sounds, what did they signify? Oh, yes, his name. _Loki._ So it was meaningless after all. 

"Let's clean him up, come on. There you go." Something warm and wet on his face, wiping away blood and sick. It brushed over the wound above his eyebrow, sending a wave of bright, blinding pain through his head. "Stay awake, Loki. Come on. Stay with me." 

"I can't heal it," Loki appealed, trying to reach up, fist his hands in something, but he couldn't feel them. "My magic has stopped working." 

"Get some ice. We need that, need to make the swelling go down." Loki snarled, trying to pull his face away, but the hands held firm. "What species are you?" They mocked him, he was certain of it, they seemed not to realize. "I want to help the swelling go down, Loki, I just need to know. Is your brain here?" One hand moved to brush over his temple, and Loki tried to nod. "Just say yes or no."

"Of course it is!" he snapped.

"Okay, good, and ice. We need to ice your head. Will it hurt you? You don't seem happy about the idea." 

Loki tried again to pool his magic in the tips of his fingers, where he supposed them to be. "I cannot feel my fingers. I still have fingers, yes?" Something clenched around the digits of his left hand and _squeezed_ , and he gasped. The pain was grounding, too, one of a few thin strings tying him to consciousness. 

"Here's th' ice, sir". 

"That's not ice. That is meant to preserve severed limbs on battlefields, we're not gonna use it on his _face_. Why do you even have that?"

"Well, we didn't have much notice, did we? 'S cargo, innit?" 

"Dump it in water and make some ice, then!" 

There was a faint hissing noise. "Loki, I need you to open your eyes." Were they closed? Loki huffed in surprise, trying to scramble up the swiftly tilting platform of his mind without tumbling down. "Hitchhiker," the voice pleaded, "open your eyes, now!" Loki grunted assent, looking up at the speaker. Was he lying on his back? How odd, he didn't quite remember moving. Something cold and soft moved to cover the wound, the weight on his forehead strangely comforting. "What color are my eyes? Tell me." 

"That is a foolish question."

"Just answer it," he snapped.

Loki concentrated, focusing his vision as concretely as possible at the face hovering above him. "Brown. Your eyes are brown." He fell out of focus again, head pounding incessantly. "I wish to sleep." 

"No, you should stay awake until we get the swelling down. Definite no on the sleeping thing, sleeping is bad. Talk to me, darling-- woah, back off my patient. What the hell is _that?_ " 

"You heard what he said," remarked the second voice. Loki closed his eyes stubbornly, and felt calmer, numb, restricted, possibly because he could not force his heavy lids open again. "This will boost his magic." 

"Not you too, Brucie! C’mon, _magic?_ "

There was a growl. "No, Tony. Not me. This is coming straight from the other guy, and for once I'm going to listen. Now _move_." The hands cradling his face shifted and disappeared, and Loki frowned at the loss. He felt himself beginning to slip into blank, blissful nothingness, the last thread loosening. "Mr. Loki. Are you awake?" He made a soft noise of dissent. "This...has the potential to hurt a lot, I really wouldn't know." 

There was a sharp pinch in the skin of his upper arm, like a snake sinking its fangs in. And then the venom dripped out, and the whole world realigned in a flash of fire that coursed through his blood. Loki's spine arched off the ground, his dormant magic shocked into action, humming over his skin like a thousand tiny wasps. His eyes flew open, and he gasped for breath, vision clearing and superfocusing until he could pick out the individual molecules dancing in the air before him. Banner backed away, holding the empty syringe at arms length, as though it might burn him. Loki sat up as slowly as he dared, reaching tentatively up to brush cool fingertips across his forehead, dispelling the throbbing wound as though it had never existed at all. 

"Son of a bitch," breathed the Mechanic, eyes bright and dark and very, very brown.

*

"Your mortal friends call it magic," he explained, brushing his fingertips across the console as though illustrating the concept in the dust, "and you call it science." He looked up, quirking a brow in challenge. "I come from a place where they are one and the same thing." 

The Mechanic leaned forward, tilting the back legs of his chair off of the ground. "Call it what you like, honey, but that is not science," he argued, piqued. "Science is making things, following rules and finding patterns and using them to create."

Loki grinned, swiping across the console again, as though striking a match. "But that is what I do," he explained, "I _create_." A soft flame danced in his palm, pleasantly warm, but distant enough not to burn. 

"But there are rules, correct?" Romanov leaned back in her own chair, her gaze narrow and unreadable. 

"Of course." _Friction + fuel, controlling the amount of fuel controls the size, and friction controls the heat. Don't let it touch skin directly._

"That shouldn't be possible. What, are you secreting methane or something? How is it not burning you? How are you _doing_ it?" 

He scoffed, extinguishing the flame with a flick of his wrist. "It is by all means possible. It simply requires a vast amount of energy and not a little concentration." He tapped at the console absently, fingers itching for further opportunity to expend his revitalized magic. "The proper term for the former in its latent state is _seidr_. My metaphysical form acts as a sort of storage for a set amount of seidr, which can be used to power a variety of chemical and physical reactions." Banner seemed slightly lost, but the Mechanic nodded along, clearly keeping up like a good student. Loki waved his hands in a grand gesture of showmanship. "Magic."

Romanov's eyes narrowed further still, as though disposing of all but the information she deemed most necessary. "How much of this energy are you capable of holding at once, Mister Hitchhiker?" 

Such a cold, calculating snake of a woman. Loki let his wolf-smile widen further, making no reply. He could write and rewrite the computer code of the universe.

"More than enough to give a voice to the Vashta Nerada, and convince them to follow us by possessing one of their victims." Loki turned to the Mechanic, the smile falling from his face. 

"I have told you already, I was not responsible for--"

"Woah, wait, wait," Banner stood, raising both palms in interruption. "When exactly were you planning on telling me about this?" 

The Mechanic looked between them, expression flitting from guilty to preoccupied to accusing. "Sorry, Brucie. It's been a long day." 

"I opened your ears to the language of the girl's dying thoughts," Loki cut in, unsure how effective his explanations would be, but praying that Banner would understand well enough. "If the Vashta Nerada have power enough to control a corpse, they could have hooked onto that link, and kept it open, perhaps even accidentally." 

"Yeah, but do they have power enough?" Loki and the Mechanic both turned to Banner, tensed and expectant. "Brucie?"

"I'm just going to stay out of--" He opened his mouth and closed it silently, reaching up to readjust his glasses on the bridge of his nose. "Yes." Loki sighed in soft relief, slumping back against the console. He should start keeping track of the formal apologies owed him. They might prove useful in future. 

Banner tapped a restless finger in a terse drumming pattern against the table, like a salesman knocking on a stranger's door. He looked up, a burning curiosity in the tilt of his shoulders. "The victim. Her last thoughts, what did she say?" 

"Don't do that to yourself, Bruce," Romanov warned, placing a thin white hand on his upper arm. 

"It's so dark in here." Loki inhaled sharply, swivelling around to look past a sea of broken crates and scattered weaponry at the shadowed entrance to the passageway. There was a rattling footstep, casting light on the bleached white skull of the mortal with the umbrella's body. The eye sockets stared hollowly back, filled with a buzzing swarm of invisible parasites, and the jaw drooped in a savage mockery of a grin. "Why is it so dark?" 

By the bitter stench of Nidhogg's poisonous breath, he cursed, the edge of the table digging into his lower back, would this day never end? "You again," he spat. 

"How did it get in here? There's a defense protocol for this!" 

The Mechanic let out a nervous chuckle. "I may have a little bit taken out the entire security system." 

"Tony, _what_ ," Banner's mouth slammed shut like a mousetrap sprung, and he could be overheard muttering a mental exercise in a foreign language beneath his breath. 

"It was gonna blow me up!" 

"No, it wasn't. The incineration system was compromised in the crash, Tony, it's never worked. But there were deadlocks, and safes, and doors, and you opened them all." 

"It's so dark in here. Why is it so dark?" 

"Lieutenant, what do we do?" 

"Jesus, Rick, I don't know! I don't _know_ what we do! I'm sorry to let you down, but I don't always have all the answers--"

"Brucie, hey. Calm down a second here, I'll get us out of this."

"It's so dark in here." 

"Will you?" Loki turned to them, eyes alight. "What is your brilliant plan, then, Mechanic? Enlighten me." 

There was a metallic whirring, and the sound of a weapon being cocked, jarring them all into silence. Romanov rested a fingertip elegantly on the trigger, lowering the barrel to aim at the expanse of floor beneath the skeleton's feet. "Why are you here?" she queried, tilting her head in question, causing her bloodred curls to spill over one shoulder. The creature's jaw loosened further, as though it were laughing, raising the umbrella to mirror Romanov's gun. Swirls of inky shadow spilled across the floor, reaching. "Ah, ah. Tell me." 

The tendrils of darkness retreated smoothly. "We are hungry," came the timid voice of the mortal woman, the words ugly and strange in her nervous timbre. "We will feast on your flesh. We will devour this world. Our forests will be endless, and we will eat our fill of humanity." The thing paused, lowering the umbrella. "We have no need of your meat. Our forests will be eternal. Give us only the Silvertongue, and you will all be set free." 

Loki's eyes flickered to the empty sockets of the shadow-puppet, which were fixed on him. His spine froze into a column of ice within him, rendering him immobile. He could have sworn that his heart stopped entirely, and beat erratically in his breast. The others looked on blankly, uncomprehending, and Loki seized the opportunity, climbing out of the foul pit that had been dug for him before he tumbled in further. "Some kind of a weapon?" he hissed, praying the desperate edge to his voice would go unnoticed. Ignorance truly was bliss, and could nearly always be relied upon in those who did not know his reputation.

"I don't know what this 'Silvertongue' is," drawled the Mechanic, stepping forward to confront the shifting shadows, "But I say no deal. This planet is under my protection, and I'm sure as hell not giving you any kind of weaponry against it." He folded his arms over his chest, dark eyes narrowed, and Loki could have laughed, had he the breath to spare. "Here's my counter-proposal," he offered, and Romanov stepped closer to his side, keeping the weapon trained on the creature. "All of the Vashta Nerada will leave London, and you will never come back to this planet, and maybe, just maybe, I let you live."

The bones of the girl rattled with laughter, shuddering closer until the edge of the nearest shadow threatened to creep over the toes of the Mechanic's boots. He stared back, unfazed. "I'd tell you to take the message back to the rest, but frankly, I don't like you."

"More will come. If you will not give us the Silvertongue," it stated simply, "Then we will take what we have been sent for, and we will feast." 

The ghost of a challenging smile turned up one corner of Loki's mouth. "I believe we have all we need."

"Not so fast," the woman argued, holding up a finger to silence the trickster. "What is the _Silvertongue_ , and why do you want it?" 

The thing threw its head back in a mockery of the mortal woman's soft laughter, joints popping and shifting at the sudden, jerky motion. One arm extended again, swinging the umbrella in a wide, sweeping arc that had both the Mechanic and Loki stumbling back. The shadows swelled and burst like the waters of a collapsed dam. The air darkened with the parasites, an approaching thundercloud that would swallow them all whole. "Nat!" called the Mechanic, standing tip-toed at the base of a pooling shadow.

There was no sound to signify that she had pulled the trigger, only a whirlpool which formed in the swirling center of the cloud, draining the Vashta Nerada away like so much dirty bathwater. It was all gone in a matter of seconds, leaving only the Lady Romanov cradling her weaponized cage, and the skeleton of the girl, which hovered for a second and collapsed, clattering over the floor. 

Loki allowed his eyes to wander over her broken body, the shredded dress draped over thin bones, empty and void of life. Loki swallowed. It was not fully guilt, per se, that constricted his throat so. She was, after all, completely unimportant. 

He crouched before her, opposite the Mechanic, as Romanov struggled with the shuddering weapon in her arms, reaching out to run a finger along the bones of her outstretched arm, and the umbrella in her hand. It had fallen directly before him, smoothly, as though...

She was pointing to him, he realized, tightening his jaw and standing quickly, taking a few cautious steps away, as though examining from a distance. _Silvertongue._ Not many knew him by the moniker outside of the Asgardian nobility. In fact, few had known him by any name at all until his brief spell of limelight as King. Small blessings, he surmised, searching all of his companion's faces for suspicion and finding none. "I suppose we'll never know what it was they searched for," he murmured. _Who would take the bait?_

"Unless, of course, we ask Bruce, who happens to be the resident expert." The Mechanic straightened, taking a moment to stretch, rolling his shoulders. "Watcha got, Doc? What's on this ship that's so interesting, and how do the Vashta Nerada know about it?" He turned, considering for a moment. "Actually, you might as well start from the beginning."

Banner sighed, sinking back into his chair, then took off his spectacles and folded them, placing them on the table beside him. "Two years ago, I took a late night walk by the Thames. I'd had a breakthrough, thought I might be able to get somewhere with an antidote for Miss Romanova, and I needed some fresh air to think. While I was out walking, I... met Rick Jones." He exchanged a glance with the boy, and Loki raised an eyebrow. 

"He pickpocketed you," supplied the Mechanic, and Banner cleared his throat. The boy smiled faintly, then tried to hide his amusement.

"The ship crashed... almost on top of us, and this thing crawled out, snarling at us in some language we couldn't understand. Then there was an explosion," he shrugged. "Half of the ship detonated, like some kind of chemical bomb. We were at the epicenter. The other half fell into the river, and we built tunnels to the wreck. But," he shrugged again, "some of the cargo got out."

"You're telling me that there was a fuck-ass gigantic explosion in the middle of London two years ago, but no one actually noticed?" His eyes were dark and calculating.

Banner coughed, spinning his glasses in a small circle on the tabletop. "No one remembered it." He smiled softly, as though terrified and unable to show it. "In their defense, I don't really remember it much, either. I wasn't... me when I woke up."

"Your Hulk," whispered Loki before he could stop himself, and Banner's smile flickered, eyes tight.

"We were kind of...joined, in the explosion, I think. It's a bit difficult to understand. He's in my head, always, just waiting for my pulse to get a little bit too fast so he can hijack my brain and take over." His fingers tightened around the wire frames, knuckles white. The smile dropped from Banner's face, leaving behind something raw and darker. Romanov tensed. "Do you know what that's like, living in constant fear of what you could do at any moment? How at the drop of a hat you could lose control, and innocent people will die?" 

"Yes," muttered Loki, and he stilled, hearing Romanov add, "You know that I do," in a soft, cool voice. The Mechanic's eyes bored into the table before him, his face hard as polished rock, something roiling in his dark gaze. So many broken things in one little room.

Banner chuckled, a self-deprecating twist to his mouth. "So that's why I let the world believe I was dead. Because I'm a coward, and I had a job to do."

"Atonement?" 

Banner just smiled. "You know how it is. You have red in your ledger, you can't help trying to wipe it out." 

"Even when you know that it means nothing?" Loki countered, biting harshly on the words. 

"It doesn't mean nothing," Banner snapped, and closed his eyes for a moment, exhaling slowly. "It's the other guy's fault that all of the Vashta Nerada are out there. I've been trying for two years to get them all back."

Loki drummed his nails on the table. "The escaped cargo. I see." 

"Yeah, but why were they even on board? How did they get there?" The Mechanic stood, impatient. 

Banner settled the glasses back on the bridge of his nose, sighing again. "That's what I keep trying to tell you, Tony. Don't you see? The grenades, the Vashta Nerada, the guns, Sakaar? This is a warship." 

The Mechanic froze, eyes raking over the spilled and decimated crates. "Are any of them--" he choked and cut himself off. "Vashta Nerada on a warship. That's... that's like fucking _dogfighting_ , doesn't that violate a few articles of the Shadow Proclamation?" His face was twisted, pained, and plagued with a depth of guilt that had Loki positively _itching_ to exploit the prominent weak spot.

Banner looked at him sympathetically. "Hulk doesn't seem to care." 

He furrowed his brows, an expression that promised blood and had Loki's every nerve screaming danger. "So what the hell is this Silvertongue, then? Another bomb? A paradox machine? A _Dalek?_ "

"That's the thing, Tony," Banner explained. "There's no weapon on board called a Silvertongue. There is no 'Silvertongue' on this ship." 

Loki lowered his gaze to the tabletop, blood running cold in his veins. Why did it have to be _him_ , why couldn't the monsters have wanted the immortal woman, or Banner and his beast? 

(We have a proposition for you, Loki of Asgard.) 

He frowned, tongue darting out to wet his lips. It was, as the Mechanic would say, too much of a coincidence, for two such beings to be sent to _collect_ him in such a short amount of time. Something was waiting in the dark, something that wanted him, and his mind was wide open to its power. Which meant that all of his dreams were not really just dreams, and he had to find out what was following him before it found him first. 

Someone was staring at him. Loki raised his eyes to see Rick Jones, his brow furrowed, a questioning tilt to his head. He stared back. Would the boy reveal him? He had every right, if he so chose, and Loki was powerless to stop him. Rick Jones bit his lip, seeming to come to a decision. "Maybe th' spear's the Silvertongue." 

"What?" 

The boy looked away, leaving Loki to lean back in his chair, conflicted. "The spear. Silver, innit?" 

Banner pursed his lips. "But it's Chitauri tech. It's just a spear, why would it have a name?"

"Perhaps it's simply how the Vashta Nerada refer to it," suggested Loki, with a sideways glance at the weapon, lying abandoned on the patch of floor where it had spun out of his grip. "It would be apt. A silver tongue is similarly capable of manipulation." 

The Mechanic blinked. "Is that some kind of double entendre?"

"If you like." Loki grinned, supposing that, to be fair, his considerable prowess in bed was likely at least partly responsible for the nickname, if a slightly lesser known partly. And people were known to be so careless with his head between their legs. 

Banner looked with some measure of apprehension between the two. "The spear, huh?" He picked it up as though it were liable to explode, testing the weight and balance with one hand. "Let's test it out."

*

"The cage shattered in the explosion," the doctor explained, waving a hand expressively at the enormous structure of metal and glass, and the mass of smoky darkness hovering inside, twisting in a shadowy maelstrom. "One of the first things I did was built a new one." He handed the spear off to the Mechanic, who eyed it warily, and held out his hands to Romanov, who unslung the gun fluidly from around her neck and placed it in his waiting arms. "For storage," grunted Banner, as he unhooked the blinking canister from the back of the weapon. 

Crossing to the translucent box of glass, he slid the container into a cat-flap-like slot in the side. He pressed a few buttons, and a second, much smaller cloud of smoke was expelled from the canister, buzzing angrily around the cage before joining the larger mass, which increased in speed like a rock thrown at a hornet's nest. 

"Rick," he announced, "Take Miss Romanova and stand guard, please." 

"Lieutenant." The boy nodded, and tossed the gun to the lady, who caught it one-handed. "Empty canisters are out here..." 

"Well, hitchhiker." The Mechanic held the spear stiffly in one hand, showing clear inexperience with hand-to-hand combat. The glowing blue of the inlaid jewel was reflected in his eyes, staining them with cobalt light. "Can you make them talk?"

Loki turned away, stepping closer to press his palm to the cool glass. "It's different, with the swarm. There is no speech to translate." He peered inside at the shifting shadows, calculating patterns in their motion. "The difficulty is far greater." 

He saw the answering insubordinate grin reflected in the surface of the glass. "Can you do it?" 

"Of course." Loki let the smooth marble words slip from his lips like a fountain of cool water, closing his eyes. The glass heated rapidly where seidr-drenched fingertips made contact with it. Old words, the Oldest, dripped from his tongue sweetly, words of seeking. A true master needed only to think them, true, but distance raised a barrier which only a greater force could serve to breach. 

Once infused deeply enough with the essence of the creatures, Loki prepared to search for the thin threads of life that bound them all, to give them a voice, but found it unnecessary. There was another voice in their simple minds already, whispering the message they were to pass on. Loki slipped out of their collective consciousness with haste, before the whispering voice could hear his own words. 

The glass was cool and solid against his forehead when his eyes flew open, gasping for breath. The seidr burned an aching path through his bones, too unrefined, like sewing with a broadsword. He needed subtlety, he needed control. "Give me the spear." He reached out a hand, open and waiting. 

"I don't think--"

"Mechanic," he growled, eyes still fixed on the creatures in their cage, the voice commanding them. The scepter was placed in his hand, and Loki felt the familiar electric shock of his mind aligning with the force inside the weapon. 

Again, he directed his magics with the words of the Oldest Tongue, ones that the spear chose for him, words of asking rather than seeking, a plea, a request. 

The whispering voice laughed, and did as he said, using Loki's magic to amplify its speech, a crude sort of microphone. "Silvertongue," it hissed, and Loki gritted his teeth. "Bring me the Silvertongue, and we will feast on the meat of empires, worlds, galaxies. They will be laid at our feet."

"Son of a mother bitch," the Mechanic murmured, his eyes wide, and Banner took his glasses off slowly and carefully, as though afraid to make any sudden moves. 

"Is this your Silvertongue?" Loki raised it boldly in full view of the Vashta Nerada, the power singing in his veins, bringing a familiar numbness that revealed how close he was to losing control again. 

"The spear!" replied the voice, and Loki suppressed a shudder; it was the voice of the Other one who haunted his dreams, guttural and ruthless. "Worlds will fall through the Silvertongue, they will become our forests. The spear will fell all who stand against, the Silvertongue will tear out their hearts--"

The numbness was spreading to his mind too quickly, and Loki dropped the spear, which burned like ice in his hand. The voice was silenced, and the numbness dissipated like fog in the wind. Loki tilted his head back, inhaling as though his life depended on it, gasping for air like a drowning man. "I can't--"

There was a noise like a thunderclap, and all three were knocked back, feet slipping out from under them. Banner groaned and shut his eyes tight in the wake of the soundwave, while the Mechanic's face grew blank with gathering horror. Loki blinked away the last of the hooks which the telepathic field had threatened to sink deep into his ravaged mind, glancing back at the cage and cursing when a second thunderclap rattled the structure, jarring his wrists where they supported his dazed weight. 

The Vashta Nerada moved as one, retreating like the tide of a great black ocean before swelling again into a tsunami, slamming full-force against the thick glass. The vibration shook the entire surface of the translucent prison, rippling it like a rock thrown in still water. "Oh, _fuck_ ," Loki managed eloquently. 

"That glass is seven centimeters thick," Banner reassured. "I don't think it's going to be a problem." The dark lines under his eyes were made prominent by his nonetheless worried stare. 

The Time Lord reached out his metal-clad hand to wrap around the scepter, drawing it back with caution. "They want this, whatever the hell it is." He flexed his fingers, drawing the blade over the floor as he pulled it away from the cage and out of Loki's reach. "It's the Silvertongue," he confirmed, voice low. "It has to be." 

The next resounding crash of shadow against glass was accompanied by a sound reminiscent of ice cubes shattering in a drink. The blood drained from Loki's face, noting the hairline fractures now spiderwebbing through the supposedly impenetrable glass. It had been heated and cooled far too swiftly, he realized. There was a flaw in the prison, a scale missing from the dragon's underbelly, and the Vashta Nerada were concentrating their force on that spot. "That glass will shatter," Loki warned. 

The Mechanic looked to be biting back a correction, a grim turn to his mouth when he took in the thin web of cracks. "Can you hold them back?" 

He glanced down at his hands, the reddened, tingling skin stretched over his bones there. "For how long?"

"A while." He bit his lip, considering. "Give me an hour."

Loki stared back at his palms. The glass shuddered again. It would be... taxing, to expend his magic directly for so long, but he could not risk utilizing the spear, convenient as it was. "I would require a conduit of some kind."

"Not the spear," he stipulated, "I need that myself, and the further away from these bastards it ends up, the better." 

"I don't want it," Loki agreed, eyeing the rebounding wave of shadows with growing unease. They made to charge again, and he placed a palm to the surface of the glass again, shielding it reflexively and gritting his teeth at the oppressive heat and drawing it away again once the last of the aftershock passed.

The Mechanic sighed. "Take this." There was a series of hollow clicks, and the gauntlet fell away from his hand. "Easy enough to use, just point and pull the trigger." He tossed it to Loki, who slid his own thin wrist inside of the mechanism, staring in undisguised awe at the joints and plates, sliding together like threads on a loom, shying away at the unfamiliar dimensions of the hand within before readjusting automatically. He raised an eyebrow, examining the strange metal glove from all angles; red and gold, with a thin, soft inner layer that slid like silk over his skin. "If what you've got stocked up is just energy, the repulsor should conform nicely to your signature. Science and magic, who knew?" Loki let a thin smile pull at the corners of his mouth, feeling the final alignment as his seidr began to pool from his fingertips and through the glove, refining and balancing. "Not a scratch, hitchhiker," warned the Mechanic. 

"I make no promises," Loki turned to splay his enclosed palm across the weakened glass, turning his shield from a vague wall of obstruction to a spell weaving through the cracks and reinforcing the defenses. 

"I do. One hour, and you can stop being the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike." He spun away, flexing his newly bared fingers and tapping them rhythmically over the blue light in his chest. "Hold tight, sweetcheeks."

"I'll just... go with you, then," Banner spoke up, "See what I can do to help." 

The Mechanic froze, considered, and then shook his head liberally. "Actually, I think you'd be really good right here, keeping him company. Fixing the cracks," he said, and smiled. "Speaking of promises kept." He sauntered away again, leaving Loki exasperated but strangely grateful, and Banner confused with a vague air of subtle fond irritation.

"Wait," he adjusted his glasses again, another gesture Loki mentally catalogued with his nervous tics. "Tony, what are you doing? What's your plan? You mind filling me in at least?"

"Isn't it obvious, Brucie?" the Mechanic called back, "I'm gonna go build a bomb!"   
*   
"So." 

Loki watched them rise and fall, a swirling cloud of darkness that sometimes disappeared entirely, casting impossible shadows over the floor and ceiling of their prison. His arm ached faintly, the seidr flowing through it spent partly in returning feeling to the stiff limb. The rest continued to pulse through the fractured glass, protecting it. He meditated, while he could; eyes closed or open, his breathing shallow and even in his chest, focusing the steady stream of energy, out, out.

Banner sat beside him, looking utterly exhausted, but clearly not foolish enough to doze off in the presence of a near stranger. "So," he repeated dryly, and trailed off, apparently uncertain how to initiate the conversation he wished to be having. 

Loki offered him no assistance. There were many more immediate concerns in his mind. The Vashta Nerada continued to shift silently, hungrily, mocking him in his ignorance. _Who,_ he burned with the need to ask _Who searches in the darkness for Loki No-One's-Son? What have they to offer, for I have nothing that they would desire._

He felt Banner's black eyes boring into him, a restrained curiosity in the wrinkle of his forehead. "What?" he snapped, "Do not sit there staring and think that I'll not notice you thinking loudly enough to wake the dead, _ask_!"

The doctor sighed, correcting his falsely relaxed posture, shrugging his shoulders faintly. "The spear."

Loki nodded; he'd been expecting as much. 

"How did a low-level telepathic field get inside your head? You don't strike me as a weak-willed kind of guy." 

He reached further up, tracing a metal-wrapped finger over the maze of cracks in the glass with a smile painted on his lips. "My mind is damaged," he explained in a voice barely above a whisper, the kind he would use to reassure, seeing that his message would be absorbed but not deeply analyzed. "There are lesions in my mental defenses. Deep, easily detected, and, unfortunately, easily exploited." He turned his smile on Banner. "For the moment I suppose weak-willed is rather an appropriate term." 

He stared, eyes dark and shuttered, but smiled in return. "I see." Banner sunk back down, satisfied. "So these 'cracks' he mentioned fixing?"

"In my mind, yes." Loki turned back to the task at hand, watching the cloud of shadows convulse and slam side-om into his reinforced wall. He felt the shudder up his arm and throughout his chest, bouncing off of his ribs, realizing how easy it would be to simply step back and watch it shatter, shrapnel studding the ground, shadows pouring out like tar, melting flesh and devouring all in the search for him. A sort of idea sprung fully formed into his mind. 

"Which is why you're traveling with him, obviously." 

"Obviously," he replied coolly, fingers flexing in the metal glove. "He seemed to think that you could be of assistance in helping to heal them." 

Banner laughed. Loki turned to him, brow creased. "No, he knew I wouldn't be able to do a thing. But let me guess: he asked you to be his companion, and you refused." He chuckled again at Loki's assenting nod. "Oh, the sly bastard." Loki stared at him, waiting for the explanation that would follow, and at the same time glad for the distraction. Banner raised a brow. "All of time and space within reach, and you really think that the Mechanic wouldn't be able to land you exactly where you needed to be, first time? If you were only on board to find a way to fix your problem, he'd never have bothered with taking you here." 

Loki gaped, glancing from the doctor to the cage to the gauntlet on his arm. He'd had his suspicions, certainly, but had put it down to a lack of competency. Stupid, stupid of him to so underestimate the Mechanic. Running his tongue over the sharp edge of his teeth, Loki growled. "Why?" he demanded. "Why take me along at all, with no intention of upholding his end of the bargain?" 

"Oh, I'm sure he'll fulfil his promise eventually, don't worry," Banner reassured, with a subtle grin. "Tony's a liar, but he's loyal. He tried to do the same thing to me, you know. Said he needed someone there. He loses his mind, traveling alone for too long."

Loki snorted. "And then there would be two of us. We can't have that."

"You'd be surprised by the number of psychopaths that have traveled with the Mechanic, Mister Hitchhiker," he divulged, fiddling absentmindedly with the hem of his jacket. "They seem to last the longest." Banner looked up and down, considering. "Are you familiar with the term 'Folie à Deux'?" 

Loki was not, but did not say as much, his thoughts wandering back to the beasts in the cage. "French?" 

Banner nodded assent. "It's... a psychiatric term. It describes a madness shared by two people with strikingly similar minds. Tony and yourself, for example. You could do each other either the most harm or the most good."

"I'd thought you weren't that sort of a doctor."

Banner smiled guiltily. "Not in practice. I don't really have the temperament. But the point still stands."

"Two madmen in a dimensionally improbable spaceship doubling as a flying car," Loki murmured. It was like the beginning of a grand cosmic joke. He turned back to the doctor, a kind of cold calculation in his lean face. "You suggest similarities between he and myself that do not exist. I, for one, am not in the least loyal."

The gentle smile fell from Banner's face, leaving his gaze hard and weathered, with a barest hint of green. "Then I guess you won't be with him for very long." 

Loki grinned his best grin, a shark smelling blood in the water. "Not a second longer than it takes to fulfill our bargain." 

Banner nodded, appeased, and fixed him with a stern glare. "If you hurt him," he warned, voice low, "I will hunt you down and crush your skull under the other guy's foot." 

A burst of shocked laughter bubbled up in his throat. "You ask my intentions and threaten my life if I cause the Mechanic pain? By the Nine, it isn't as if I wish to _bed_ the man!" As soon as the words left his mouth, a dead weight of comprehension sank his stomach, and his mouth slammed shut. Visions of skin over skin, stained with oil and sweat and come, heat and breath and his name moaned into the sheets danced through his head. Filling that clever mouth with his cock, twisting his fingers into dark hair, and seeing a familiar lust reflected in his bottomless eyes. Loki did indeed wish, and Norns how he ached for it. He _burned_ with the realization, aware that he stood with unnatural stiffness before the cage, staring into its depths with too great an intensity. This had the potential to rather complicate matters.

The glass felt hot even through the material of the glove, causing his fingers to tremble as he pulled cautiously back on the flow of seidr, allowing it to cool. He'd gotten carried away again. One more slip and surge of power like that could cause the glass prison to shatter apart entirely. 

One little... mistake, and the shadows would move again, gathering the rest and returning to him, to deliver this proposition of theirs. And as the party responsible for freeing them, Loki could easily demand all the information he desired. And after that, it would be a simple matter to follow whatever explosive scheme the Mechanic had planned, placing the blame on a single second of error that he could hardly be suspected of _orchestrating_.

And all it would take was the slightest push.

Oh, elegant. 

Loki seized the opportunity, wincing and shuddering as the cracks began to spread. The Vashta Nerada shifted in excitement, surging in dark waves inside their room with a view. Banner's stern glare was twisted almost immediately with concern. "What's going on?" 

"I--" he panted, clawing at the surface with the gauntlet, which gave a few pathetic bursts of energy. "My concentration slipped." The spiderweb of fractures doubled in size and tripled in complexity, a celtic knot woven through the six-centimeter glass. 

"Focus," he snapped, "Quickly." 

Loki hid his smirk behind a moan of pain, watching the shadows as they sensed the moment approach, and sending a concussive blast of magic through the weakened frame, shattering it into a hundred thousand crystalline shards. 

For a moment, they stood there side by side, listening to the musical tinkle of the broken glass as it rained down. Loki's eyes widened in false horror, and the room was plunged into darkness.

*

He dove through the shadows, this time plagued with a fiery burn across every inch of his skin. Loki assumed that Banner fared no better, writhing in his hands where they wrapped around his thin torso. All around them, a million teeth were bared to devour. Loki snarled, grabbing him tight and praying that he would not hold a hollow body when he resurfaced. 

Gathering his wits, he raised the gauntlet high above his head, emitting a high-pitched whine that his eardrums barely registered as noise. The fiery sensation abated, and he tumbled sideways into the light. 

"Bruce? Loki?" The Mechanic shot upright, knocking scraps and tools to the ground haphazardly, pulling off a pair of round goggles as though suspicious that they were causing him to hallucinate. "What happened?"

"No time to explain," Loki barked, laying Banner on his side, where he continued to writhe. Alive, then. Good, as he did require a witness. He stood, trembling ever so slightly, unsure himself whether or not it was an act, and turned to the Mechanic with fire in his eye. "Have you built it?" he demanded.

His hair was more mussed than usual; the jacket and waistcoat tossed aside, with stains and burns littering his tanned skin. The light of his chestpiece shone brightest blue through the thin material of the shirt, illuminating his features with the haunting glow. Loki pushed back the tide of warm admiration or lust that tightened his chest, examining the work surface as though he could identify anything on it. The Mechanic's jaw tightened, and he gestured to what looked like a messy array of pipes and wires, the empty shells of the grenades littered around the structure. "Close enough. I think. No time for running diagnostics, though. How long do we have?" 

Loki cracked a thin grimace. "They broke out perhaps thirty seconds ago. But if you've the bomb and the spear, we should suffer no complications, provided we leave _now_." 

He nodded tightly, tossing away the goggles and reaching for the rough construction that would save them all. "I was hoping for another ten minutes at least, ideally. Nat, grab the lightsaber and lets skedaddle." Romanov stared, incredulous. "What? Kind of in a rush here," he said impatiently. 

"You told him your plan? You didn't even tell us your plan." Her fingers were light and dexterous around the spear, and Loki wondered if she had indeed mastered the use of every weapon known to the nine realms. The woman could best even Lady Sif in battle, though she be blindfolded and bound with Fenris-wolf's unbreakable cords. Or so he suspected, and he was not often wrong.

"He didn't tell me," Loki corrected, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. "I figured it out." He spun again to face the Mechanic, flexing his fingers inside the gauntlet. "Lure, confront, and detonate remotely? I'd thought you'd attempt more of an appeal to their humanity." 

"Yeah, well," he bared his teeth. "They got their chance. Also, look closer, I used--"

There was a savage, pained growl, and they looked back to see Banner contorted on the floor, curled into the fetal position, with a verdance rippling across his skin dangerously. "Perhaps taking him with me through the shadows was a bad idea," Loki considered aloud, and the doctor moaned through clenched teeth, the veins in his arms standing out wide and green, swelling by the second.

"Bruce," Romanov said, as though the sound of his own name would prove miraculously grounding to the doctor, reversing the damage done. It was, of course, a futile effort. 

The Sakaarlan roared, pounding its fists into the ground, and the cabin shook and groaned. Loki slid a few quiet steps to one side, taking hold of an extra gun, keeping his eyes locked on the transforming Banner. The Hulk looked up darkly, his beady black eyes sparkling with malice, and the next pound of a fist sent a jet of murky water spouting upwards. The walls creaked ominously, and the Mechanic swallowed. "Run."

The passage, if anything, seemed only to have shrunk on this second journey, perhaps because of the groans and rattles emanating from the walls. Loki ran lightly, his feet sending up a faint spray of muddy water as he went. Before him went the Mechanic with his bomb, and the boy, dirty and unkempt as ever. Behind him was the lady Romanov, twisting to avoid the enthusiastic blows of the green berserker.

Loki nearly plowed into the pair in front of him when the Mechanic stopped short, ushering them on up the ladder, crowned with a faint circle of midday light. It was morning. Loki balked, seeing him intend to stay behind. He told himself that he was simply hesitant to have the man at his back, but ignored it in favor of pressing the boy forward and out. He lingered a second longer in the path of the oncoming verdant storm, but Romanov glared until he gave in and began to climb. 

"One second. How's things, big guy?" The Mechanic leaned back against the slick wall, grinning like a fool. "Yeah, insubordination, I know, yes sir and all that bullshit."

Loki froze, glancing back over his shoulder at the view from above, the Mechanic's debauched head of hair and the muscular, lumbering form of the beast. He inhaled sharply, mind supplying a wide variety of images on the theme of the Mechanic, crushed and beaten bloody. 

The Hulk seemed as shocked into silence as Loki, tilting his massive head to the side questioningly. There was a long pause, during which the Mechanic remained perched on the bottommost rung, staring him down with glee, his arms laden with explosive materials. Finally, he let out an impressive roar, slamming a fist into the passage wall and sending up a thin spray of dust. 

Romanov reached down to haul the Mechanic up by one arm as the berserker charged, the impact rattling up the ladder and shaking Loki into action, swinging himself fluidly out onto the surface and turning to greet Romanov as she followed behind, still dragging a struggling Mechanic. "No, wait, we're fighting the Vashta Nerada," he protested. "I need your help, Bruce!" 

"Jones," ordered Romanov tersely, "Close that, now. We'll come back for him later." The boy scurried to obey, but Loki grabbed his arm, stilling him. 

"The shadows are moving," he implored, "To leave him there is to leave him to his death. And besides, the Mechanic is correct." He dug his fingers in tighter, and released. "We require help from both your doctor and his beast." Loki spared a glance at the Mechanic, seeking confirmation, but finding him distant and noticeably pale, averted his gaze. 

The pavement cracked apart in places to admit the Hulk's burly form as he launched himself into the street, covered in dust and river mud. In the harsh white light of Midgard's sun, the behemoth did seem more emerald than green, the color deeper and strangely iridescent. He breathed heavily for a moment, turning his dark gaze on the Mechanic. "Help Tony," he growled. 

The Mechanic laughed, all traces of his former forlorn countenance long vanished. "Alright, then," he volunteered, strapping the bomb to one shoulder with a cleverly designed strap which had Loki's eyes narrowing in suspicion. "Allons-y!" 

Romanov shrugged, choosing for the moment to accept partnership with the Hulk for what it was. Loki supposed that she needn't worry overly about who played the part of her ally, as she could take most of the group down without a thought. Honestly, the more Loki understood of the woman, the less he liked her. "Where to now?" she asked.

The Mechanic paused mid-stride, as though the thought genuinely hadn't yet occurred to him, turning to examine the line of houses retreating into the distance on either side, shabby and stinking of the river. "Um. JARVIS?" He looked to his bare forearm, and back up to Loki, a bit helplessly. 

Eyes flickering down to the gauntlet, he creased his brow, flexing his fingers with an air of uncertainty. "Easily defensible houses in the vicinity, JARVIS?" 

"Shall I display the locations for you, Sir?" Loki felt the humming vibrations of the disembodied reply ghost over his skin beneath the silk underlayer of the glove, and suppressed a shiver. 

"Rather," he affirmed.

He could have sworn that the ship _scoffed_. "With all due respect, Mr. Loki," it drawled, and Loki clenched the gauntlet into a fist, half-intent on crushing the smug voice beneath his fingers. "I was addressing Mr. Stark." 

The Mechanic bit his lip, presumably to contain a spurt of laughter. Loki scowled, and he stepped forward, wrapping a hand around Loki's wrist and holding it up to his mouth like a microphone. "Go ahead, darling." Loki felt a pocket of seidr tugged from him, spinning listlessly in midair until the machine took over, sending out a laserlike line of energy towards the nearest location. It hung in midair, drawing Loki forward, a thin orange beam originating in the center of his palm. "Well that's different," the Mechanic remarked. "Remind me, we're gonna run tests later. Like, a lot of probably invasive and annoying tests. For science." And he rushed off, following the path of the beam with a spring in his step. Loki rolled his eyes, still piqued, and made to follow; the woman and the beast already charging on ahead with him.

A thin, dirty hand grabbed at his shoulder, pulling him to a halt, and he let out a silent burst of laughter, stepping back to accommodate the sudden stop. "Why d' they want you, eh?" Rick Jones clenched his round, boyish jaw in a show of force. "Why not th' Lieutenant? You eat people too or sumfink, Silvertongue?" 

Loki smoothed out his jacket calmly, eyes sparkling with amusement. "I haven't the faintest idea, and no. Mortals carry all sorts of unpleasant diseases. I would hate to come down with anything." He bared his teeth again in a feral smile, sauntering forward, but the boy stopped him again. 

"I won't tell 'em." His face was grave, more unperturbed than such a young face had any right to be for all his experience. "About th' name. The thing pointin' at you." 

Loki let out another laugh, this one entirely cold and mirthless. "I would cut out your tongue before you had the chance," he warned, leaning in close to cast his shadow over the underfed, dirty face. There was no need for masks and deceptions with Rick Jones, not when the truth was so much more effective. He was a fool, and a young fool at that. If Loki was a fool, he had the advantage of being the oldest fool in the universe. 

"You were protecting me," Rick Jones faltered. "From 'im. Tellin' me to hide, luring 'im away. Y' didn't need to do that." 

Loki said nothing, shielding his face and his thoughts, sliding out of the boy's weak grip. "Consider us even," he replied icily, apathetic. _Sentiment, just because he is a child--_ He turned his back, following the insistent pull of the magic at his fingertips. 

"You hurt th' Lieutenant," vowed Rick Jones; small, thin, and mortal, "An' I'll find a way t' hurt you, too." 

"Duly noted," he nodded, rapping twice on the door in front of him. It swung inward to reveal the remainder of the group, the Mechanic freezing mid-pace. 

"There you are! What took you so long?" he demanded, his hair wild in a way that suggested he'd been running his fingers through it worriedly. "I thought you'd both been reduced to mincemeat!" The Hulk grunted in agreement, breaking off the banister to the stairwell with a swing of one arm. 

Loki scoffed as Rick Jones brushed past him, loading a canister into his gun with a soft click. "Don't be foolish. They have not even been summoned yet." He held out a hand, palm up. "The spear."

"No."

"Mechanic," he hissed, "I like it no better than you, but to utilize it properly requires _energy_."

"I can handle this, I'm a big boy. Toilet-trained and everything." He tossed the thing with one arm and caught it, and even from a distance of a few feet the whirling motion of the blue stone had Loki's vision blurring. He lifted it high, like a lightning rod in a thunderstorm, the eerie light playing over his gleeful face. "Thing is, honey," he declared, with a sidelong glance at Loki, "I'm battery-powered. I've got plenty of energy." 

A powerful bolt, thick and blinding white, crashed through the ceiling; the resounding clamor made it clear that the very roof of the abandoned house had been no obstacle, the signal flare flying high up into the London sky and erupting like a second sun. 

Loki remembered the honey set in his own trap, a much subtler variety, standing in the shadows with Banner in his arms as the quiet susurrus of the Vashta Nerada prickled over his skin with a thousand soft whispers. He remembered his own answering whisper _I accept your offer. Come and get me._ Loki remembered the burning pain washing away into numbness, and the answering laughter, the Other's spine-chilling laughter. 

And there was no doubt about it, they were coming. The question was how long they would wait. 

"That should do it, don't you think?" He lowered the spear to his side, but gripped it tight, as thoigh reluctant to cease using it. 

The Hulk growled, much less verbose now that he fought alongside them, snapping the banister in two and brandishing the twin shards like daggers. Romanov smiled, loading her own weapon with a few practiced gestures and charging the electrical pulse bands wrapped around her wrists for good measure. Loki reached for his quickly draining supply of seidr, sending as much power as he would risk to the gauntlet, which glowed with the energy. Following by example, he loaded the clip into his own gun, somewhat eager for the chance to utilize the intriguing weapon. He met Rick Jones' eyes across the room, afire with adrenaline. This was it, the crucial stage of the plan. 

"Hulk, Miss Romanova, Ron-"

"Rick!"

"Whatever. Cover an exit each. Try to stay out of the way of the bomb when it detonates; it's gonna wash out the entire floor of the building, suck all of the Vashta Nerada into a handy little pocket dimension." He patted the side fondly, and Loki saw the canisters built into the mechanism, surrounded by wires and a few small, colorful vials. "Hitchhiker, you and I will tag-team it upstairs, work on keeping the spear as far away from the Vashta Nerada as possible and detonating this thing remotely. Just to be clear; that light goes red and you're standing there to see it, you better find something solid and hold on real tight. Any questions?" 

Loki let his eyes flicker to the floor, marking the lamps in each corner, calculating. "They're here." 

Romanov grimaced, cocking the weapon and bringing it to her cheek. "That's not all we have to worry about," she added.

"Help me. Please, help me." This skelton spoke with the voice of another young girl, American, the sound a twisted parody of her own dying terror. The Hulk roared, swinging his makeshift daggers as the shadows began to shift in earnest. 

"I should really get home--"

"Help me. Please help me." 

"Look, that's odd. Two shadows."

"You can save me, doctor. I have faith." 

"I can't see! Oh, God, I can't--"

Voices upon voices, old and young, male and female, like accusing ghosts come back to avenge their deaths. Now that the creatures knew how to utilise the link between their victim's dying thoughts and their own faltering speech, it seemed they had all taken to it. And beneath every voice was another, guttural and sadistic, murmuring Loki's name in an unrelenting chant.

The skeletons smashed windows in when they could not enter through doors, staggering across dusty carpets while unnatural shadows billowed beneath them in every direction. The Hulk snapped clean in two the spine of the first puppet, cut off in the middle of a pleading sob. 

Romanov was a silent but deadly wraith, flitting about the room in the corner of Loki's eye but the forefront of his battle-hardened sense of acute awareness. Rick Jones was proving himself adept far beyond his years; the gun in his hands shuddered and bucked with its load of beasts, but he held firm, moving slowly closer to the back of the house, where Loki could hear more of the skeleton creatures. 

As for himself, Loki stayed for the most part on the move, ducking and weaving and conjuring new flames when the shadows attempted to plunge the room into darkness. They were coming thick and fast, though most seemed confined to propelling the skeletal puppets, which were easily knocked down with a well-placed arm but soon rose again, inhuman and wholly undamaged. 

He took the measure of breaking the thing's neck when it resurfaced to face him again, in hopes that the mortal's death throes would be silenced, along with the whispering Other. The skeleton grinned at him, head bent back at the unnatural angle, and wrapped its bony fingers around Loki's bare wrist, the swarm trickling in and pooling around his feet. Loki struggled, teeth clenched, the gun slipping from his other hand and clattering across the floor. 

"Hitchhiker," called the Mechanic, halfway up the stairwell, well-aimed bolts of energy from the spear sizzling at his feet and banishing the creeping shadows. "Come on! There was a plan, remember the plan?"

"Yes," he snapped, "In a moment." 

His toes tingled as the swarm began to circle, the skeleton still leering sideways and whispering the word Silvertongue. Loki grunted, pulling his wrist out of the grip and hearing the dual crack of bone. He dove to the side, driving his foot into the creature's chest and sending it stumbling back. Fingers closing on the dropped weapon, he swung it around and fired in one fluid motion, revelling in the column of smoke that was sucked away, then wincing and letting it drop to one side, his throbbing hand pulled into his chest instinctively. "Damn," he muttered, and then, "Lady Romanova! A spare weapon!" 

She nodded, and followed the awkward one-handed toss, swinging the gun over her shoulder and sending a jolt of electricity through an attacking skeleton, wrists placed on either humerus. Loki watched it shudder with glee, running the next few steps to the bottommost step. 

The Mechanic smiled grimly, letting loose another blast of concentrated power to shatter a yellowed, old skeleton into at least three pieces. _Do not follow,_ he projected as loudly as he could manage, hoping it would be enough, _I will return_. 

"Okie-Dokie-Loki," he declared, grabbing his hand and _tugging_ , "Lets run-- shit, hon, what's wrong?" he backpedaled at Loki's yelp of pain. 

Loki inhaled sharply, drawing his throbbing wrist back with a tight hiss of, "Nothing whatever."

They darted up the stairs side by side, Loki still clutching at his wrist and swearing silently. In retrospect, he decided a minute or so later, sinking down against the wall and breathing heavily as his heart rate slowed, it was likely the insistent pain which had distracted him from noticing earlier that the Mechanic still had his bomb. This last he flung off, depositing it unceremoniously on the hall floor, where Loki eyed it with growing suspicion. 

"There," he panted, something strangely resigned in his countenance. "They should be distracted enough for the moment." 

"Good," he murmured, wrapping the seidr-bathed gauntlet around his shattered wrist, sighing in contentment at the feeling of the bones knitting and re-aligning, a taxing but necessary effort, if he was to be any help at all to the Mechanic or his friends downstairs.

A realization struck Loki head-on, like a slap to the face, and he turned to the Mechanic, stricken. Were they simply walking away, then? Leaving his precious Earth to be devoured? Was the bomb a decoy? He searched the Mechanic's face, leaning back against the wall a few metres away, breathing evenly as though every exhalation required effort. The spear hung limp from his other hand, pulsing with ceaseless energy that mocked them both in their exhaustion. Loki's ran bone-deep, unto his very core; the heaviness had smothered him, bound and gagged him as he'd plummeted through the void. He let his own head fall back, trembling with overexertion. 

"You would leave them to die, like cattle?" he asked, apathetic in appearance, but with a slight twinge of regret tugging at his lips, pulling them into a frown. 

"What?" A shifting noise, the Mechanic sitting up. "No. Hell no. I'm saving everyone, d'you hear?" His closest hand jabbed into the soft part of Loki's shoulder, and he opened his eyes blearily to see him staring back, eyes hard as uru. "We don't walk away. We give everything we can. That's how this works if you wanna be the hero. Rule three: we never walk away." 

Loki's lithe frame shook with laughter, dry little chuckles choked out wearily. "I despise rules," he lamented, "And heroes." Bright, shining heroes like Thor, tall heroes who cast long shadows. He looked down at his undamaged hand, wrapped in gleaming gold and bloodred metal. "You should take this back, You need it more than I, I think,"

The Mechanic swallowed hard, the color leaving his face again, and he placed both hands over Loki's atop the gauntlet. Even through layers of circuits and metal and cloth, he felt the gentle-but-rough touch and grimaced, resisting the urge to pull away. Because he should give it back, of course, he needed to-- "Keep it," the Mechanic offered shakily. "That's...eh, that's why I brought you here. A little. Um." Something spun in his eyes, dark like a hurricane. "JARVIS, activate Virginia Protocol, code nine-five-oh-four-seven. Set it to... I dunno. Five, ten minute countdown? I might need a minute or so to...you know." He smiled bitterly.

Loki's eyes narrowed, pieces flying into place, only confirmed when the machined whirred in compliance, offering an, "Of course, sir," with more than a little too much emotion for an inanimate object to possess. "My condolences." 

The Mechanic's eyes slid to the bomb, and Loki stood all at once, shaking his head incrementally. "You... idiotic bastard," he sighed accusingly. "Was there ever a remote detonator?" 

"I lost it," he retorted, crossing his arms over his chest. "Back in the tunnels. By the time I realized it was a little too late to go back." He ran a hand through his hair absentmindedly, gesturing to the device. "So I figured I'd just.. set it off manually. Just as effective. Plus I can lure in as many as possible with the spear, take them all out. It's a win-win, really," he choked out, still smiling wide and false. "Except I still have promises to keep, so. I'm giving you priority one access to JARVIS. He'll take you where you need to go, then after that, wherever you want, so that you can... make a home there. Have a life." He stepped in closer, hands still loosely clasping Loki's own. "Don't waste your life, a man once told me." 

"Who?" he demanded. 

"Doesn't matter," the Mechanic retorted. "He died. You live, everybody lives, the world gets saved."

Loki let his eyes flutter shut for a moment, considering. For one thing, he would never know what he was running from if he allowed the Mechanic to do this. And for another thing, he never would satisfy his libido and curiosity, two of the strongest forces in all of creation. "Tony," he warned, the false name bitter on his tongue, darting out to lick his lips, but well worth it to see the spark of want brim in the Mechanic's eyes, his mouth opening slightly, almost an invitation. "I cannot allow you to do this." 

He smiled again. "I know. That's the Virginia Protocol." He produced a pair of handcuffs from a pocket somewhere, or perhaps one of the pocket dimensions of which he was so fond. Loki caught the flash of metal in the corner of his eye, and smothered a laugh, forcing his expression to one of innocent confusion. "But don't worry, hitchhiker, JARVIS will be here to pick you up in a few--"

Loki closed the distance between them, capturing the Mechanic's lips in a fervent, desperate kiss. He froze, and leaned in to deepen the contact, tasting of strong alcohol and coconuts and something vaguely metallic and uniquely _him_. Loki moaned into the kiss, not even half an act, electrified with the brush of tongue against tongue, the roughness of beard and moustache on his clean-shaven chin, and the Mechanic's own answering gasp as he pulled away, sucking in a breath and diving back into the kiss, uncoordinated and rough.

He spun them around, pressing the Mechanic into the wall, attacking his mouth with all the passion he could muster as his fingers found purchase on the thin rings of metal, nails raking down the Mechanic's sides as he buried his own hands in Loki's long hair. He moaned again, for a minute completely lost in sensation and arousal and a quiet undertone of guilt. 

"I told you," Loki reminded, his voice deepened with lust as he pinned the Mechanic's arms to the wall with his hands, stroking up and down, and then biting a trail along his jawline to ghost his lips over his ear. His voice dropped to a whisper, drinking in the Mechanic's pained whimper as he slid one thigh between their bodies and _leaned_ deliciously forward. "I despise heroes." Loki smiled, claiming one last kiss before stepping away to survey his handiwork.

The Mechanic looked back, tugging helplessly with the wrist currently bolted to the door latch of the room beside. "What did you...?" he croaked, lips swollen and eyes wide with a cocktail of surprise and betrayal and need. 

Loki grinned, biting back a comment about the uses of silver tongues. "Hush," he ordered, pressing his fingertips to the Mechanic's temples. "Sleep now." 

Those accusing eyes fell shut, and Loki turned away, hoisting the spear in one hand and the bomb in the other. Both were banished with a gesture, and he leaned against the wall heavily for a moment, banishing all stirrings of arousal curling in his belly and unlatching the gauntlet from his wrist, closing it around the Mechanic's. 

There was work to be done. 

* 

The creatures were still downstairs; luckily Romanov and the behemoth could be heard in the other room, battling away. Rick Jones he could see through the shattered windows, immediately outside and away from harm, although Loki doubted that he could in turn be observed.

He sauntered down the stairwell, almost nonchalant in his even, silent stride, a pleased smirk painted on his slightly reddened lips. He took his time, eyes flickering over the shattered bones littering the floor and the uneven shadows infected with the Vashta Nerada. In the distance, battles raged on, the crack of bone and whirring of weapons and susurrus of mortal voices, ghosts trapped in an eternal echo. Loki engaged in his own battle, warfare of the mind, pausing on the bottom stair to sigh, skirting distastefully around the corpses. _Here I am, then,_ he thought. _No plan, no weapons, and no way out._ The smirk stretched across his face, exposing his teeth like a predator closing in for the kill. _Utterly powerless, and still smiling. Doesn't it terrify you?_

"We knew you would come." The voice tore through his mind like lightning, even spoken aloud as it was. Loki paused mid-stride, turning to the creature, palms spread in a gesture of innocence. The skeleton with its broken neck leered back, draped with shredded rags which smelled of rain and decay. "Silvertongue."

"All the monikers for me, and you chose one of the most obscure," Loki observed. "I am intrigued. Why?"

"It is the name we were given," supplied the swarm, almost robotically. "We were given a name, a message, and a promise only." One skeletal foot popped as it stepped forward. Loki compensated, moving back smoothly, keeping an even distance. His eyes narrowed. Intriguing indeed.

"Quite the promise you were given. Endless forests. What makes you so sure that your employer will follow through?"

Two more skeletons stalked into the room, one at each door, and Loki swallowed a flash of blind panic, watching them cross, filing in, surrounding him on all sides. It had been rather a foolish decision, conducting this interrogation from such a vulnerable position in the center of the room. Still, there were a few cards up his sleeve yet. The first skeleton rattled with laughter, jaw dislocating and swinging freely as it took another step forward. The ground was dark throughout, shadows pooling thick over the wood floor, lapping threateningly at Loki's ankles. "You," he began, and cut off, because of course the creatures did not need him alive, Silvertongue or no, if their only purpose was the delivery of a message. He'd had enough experiences with assassination attempts to know that a message could easily be nothing more than the flick of a dagger. "After all I've done for you?" he growled in warning, "Breaching the walls of your prison, opening your mouths to speech?" He glanced up the stairwell for a moment, fisting his fingers into the material of his trousers in a short-lived inner battle. "Leading those who would deprive you of your well-deserved feasting here? I've even left one chained upstairs for you." The lies came easily, coating his throat like honey as they spilled from his lips, bittered with enough truth to bend their trust.

The shadows rippled, neither retreating nor advancing. "Which is why we will deliver the message to your face, and not your corpse."

He tilted his head up, commanding and kingly. "And the message?"

The voice shifted, roughened into the nightmarish drawl that had been chanting his name in the back of his head since their arrival, and Loki froze, remaining still as claws brushed along his neck, enough pressure to redden without leaving a scratch behind. "A proposition for you, Silvertongue."

Loki forced himself to exhale slowly, seeing nothing and the creature of his dreams at once, prowling in slow circles around him. The Other's skin held a grayish pallor, like something long dead; he was draped in black robes, with a golden mask like a web over his face, highlighting reddened teeth and foul breath. "I refuse it," he faltered.

The Other grinned savagely. "You would so easily deny yourself the revenge you justly deserve, Loki of Asgard?" Loki tried to scoff, but choked on the derisive snort, eyes narrowed. "The rightful king, cast down by those who betrayed you? You would deny your throne?" Lies, Loki knew, lies, but oh so sweet if only they were truths. Inexplicably, he felt himself slipping, for one moment the edges of his reality blurring with the one this creature presented, and he looked up with fire in his gaze. "A war draws near, Liesmith. You must be sure to pick the right side."

"And whose side is that?" Loki snarled, "Perhaps I have already found a worthy cause to defend. I have no need of your empty promises. I have no need of your war, or of alliance with you."

The creature seized Loki by the throat, and he _burned_ , thrashing in the iron grip, pain coursing through him in waves. It leaned in, pressing its gray, bloodied mouth to Loki's ear. "Death pursues you, Loki Silvertongue, and she will have you whether you comply or no." The grip was bruising, crushing the breath from his lungs, and then it was gone, and the Other towered over him, for he had fallen to his knees. "You cannot outrun her for long."

He gasped for breath, a hand clutching at his throat, then sliding down to join the other in pulling out the bomb and holding it aloft, the vision crumbling to dust as the Vashta Nerada begin to back away. "Watch me."

"Mr. Loki!"

His attention was pulled away, for the shortest of moments, meeting Rick Jones' gaze through the shattered window. Loki allowed himself a fond half-smile for the idiotic child. "Manual detonation," he professed. "Change of plan. Get Banner and Romanov away from--"

The bomb was knocked from his hands, the impact of the blow sending him skidding back, where he rolled away from the grip of another skeleton. "We will take this world, and every world like it. We will feast eternally, and we will start with you, Silvertongue."

The darkness swirled around Loki, surrounding him in a cloud of blackness, and for a moment he was falling again. His life did not flash before his eyes, of course, as the last thing he wanted to do before his thread ran its course was to ruin it with sentiment. He groped in the darkness, reaching for the bomb, knowing that he would not reach it but uncaring, because even if the red in your ledger can never be washed out with a thousand waterfalls you find yourself drawn to trying.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, fingers straining through the parasite-ridden air. "Sorry." Loki did not know precisely who he was addressing, and chuckled dryly. Everyone, he supposed. Thor. Mother. The Mechanic. Romanov. Banner. Loki supposed not even he could truly escape the sentiment of the damned.

"C'nsider us even," a thin voice announced, and Loki caught a glimpse of a ragged smile before the bomb imploded and the world went white.

His fingers scrambled again for purchase, watching the shadows drain between them, swirling and howling. He clung desperately to the banister of the stair, both arms and one leg wrapped around the wood. Loki opened his eyes, and screamed, reaching out one hand towards the epicenter, but the sound was lost in the roar of the spinning vortex pulling on his every cell.

Skeletons collapsed, falling to pieces as the shadows drained away and left them empty, then dragged them along into the whirling, hungry portal. Paper was peeled from the walls, broken glass and plaster and the seemingly endless stream of shadows. Loki clung tighter, the centrifugal force whipping his long hair into his face. The white noise of the vortex built, ripping silent screams from his throat, until in a concussive blast of flame the Mechanic's bomb folded in on itself and the vortex warped and closed, trapping the Vashta Nerada, their victim's bodies, and Rick Jones forever within.

*

The Mechanic tore down the stairs two or three at a time, handcuffs still dangling uselessly from one wrist, scratched and bloodied, with the gauntlet raised in preparation for whatever tableau he expected to find laid out before him. Loki did not acknowledge him as he stopped, stumbled, eyes widening. He remained where he was; where he had always been, it seemed, one hand still clutching halfheartedly at the banister, kneeling on the ground, staring blankly at the place he had last seen Rick Jones. For one who was meant to be running, he realized dimly, he was off to a poor start.

Because he knew he should, Loki made an effort to stand, to move or turn his head, but his body remained frozen, a motif of failure carved in immobile granite.

"What happened?" The Mechanic's voice registered like an echo, distant, barely above a whisper.

Loki did not cry. Loki laughed, racked with sobs like howls of mirth.

*

Romanov took the news with a cursory nod, as though the Mechanic had made some droll remark about the weather. Loki despised her, in that moment, because he was unable to feel the same objective apathy for once in his life. It was different, he supposed, for the one directly at fault.

They did not have to tell Banner, once he had shrunk back to his mortal form. He already knew. "I'm leaving," he announced, a heavy weight twisting his brow and pressing his mouth into a thin line. "I'm going to take the Sakaarlan ship. There's nothing here for me now." _I'm running away before I do more harm_ went unspoken.

Romanov turned a wistful gaze on him for a moment, all the coolness gone from her face. Loki could not bring himself to care enough to ponder its meaning.

The Mechanic looked between them, considering, and sighed. "Do what you have to, Brucie. If you need anything... just call." He held up a pad of paper between two fingers, a blank card that sent off waves which had Loki blinking feverishly for a moment, trying to dispel the wavy image which his mind claimed was there but his eyes knew he did not see.

Banner shook his head faintly, pulling on the coat the Mechanic had laid out for him -- by some design his clothing had a tendency to remain overly large and tattered when his body changed. "You're better off without me, Tony."

His expression twisted, tucking the magical pad of paper back into his jacket pocket as the doctor smiled and walked away, black eyes humorless, holding the crumpled shell of metal in one hand. The door, even off its hinges as it was, slammed behind him with an air of finality. Romanov lingered a moment, seemingly uncertain. "Will I see you again?"

He chuckled dryly. "Will you learn to stop asking that question?" Loki stared curiously, because his expression beneath the first layer of masks foretold that good times and bad were ahead for the lady. And, he remembered, a day was coming when she would look at the both of them and see mere strangers for the second time in her unnaturally long life.

Natalia Romanova smiled her winsome, manipulative smile, punched the Mechanic lightly on one shoulder, cocked an eyebrow at Loki, and left.

The Mechanic turned to Loki, sighing again, reaching a hand up to run through his untamed mop of hair. "You gonna leave, too?"

"You presume to be rid of me so easily, Mechanic?" His voice was hoarse and rough, broken like his mind as he stood unsteadily. "You have a bargain to fulfill, I believe." And Loki had a game of cat-and-mouse to continue, with all of time and space laid before him, ripe for the picking.

"That I do," he admitted, and raised the gauntlet again, flexing each finger in turn. It seemed much more fitting on him, Loki supposed, as though he were half machine. "Come to papa, JARVIS." Almost without warning, the car was there, pulsing in and out of view with a series of loud whooshes, and coming to rest hovering a few inches above the hardwood floor. The Mechanic smiled as though greeting an old friend, patting the red-and-gold hood genially. "Override Virginia Protocol, by the way," he added, cracking open the door. "Code Yinsen, eight-seven-two-six."

The car shuddered as JARVIS hummed in apparent confusion. "Scans would suggest that Mr. Loki is still alive and undamaged, Sir. Are you certain?"

Looking back over his shoulder at Loki, a number of unreadable emotions flickering in his eyes, the Mechanic forced a thin smile. "Yeah, well, he got Code Yinsen'd himself, actually. Funny how that works out." Loki's gut wrenched again, his vision going white with the memory of the explosion, and he curled his hands into fists at his sides. "No hard feelings, hitchhiker, but that was a dirty trick you played back upstairs. I'll have to rewrite some protocols for you, I can tell."

His gaze had narrowed to Loki's lips, staring blatantly and perhaps without meaning to. Loki allowed them to curve into a false smile of his own, sauntering to the passenger side of the vehicle. "The fault is at least half yours, dearest," he drawled, recalling his rather enthusiastic participation. "And besides which," maintained the trickster, "I don't regret it."

The Mechanic's door swung open, and he climbed in. Loki followed suit. "Is that a proposition, honey?"

"No," he lied, ignoring the soft voice in the back of his head which already likened following this madman to coming home. He rolled his stiff shoulders, at long last allowing the illusory wardrobe to melt away, leaving him wholly Loki.

_Well, then, Mistress Death,_ he challenged silently, _Watch me run._

**Author's Note:**

> After a long internal struggle and lots but ultimately not enough of writing, I decided to break it into two chapters, instead of another epic oneshot. Because come on, you've waited a month already.
> 
> Again, any suggestions for the verse will be given serious consideration, and I'm fully aware how much you want to see these guys fuck like rabbits.
> 
> Ta.


End file.
